


Time Bomb

by TheSaddleman



Series: Time Bomb Continuity [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Daydreaming, Drama & Romance, F/M, Friendship/Love, Memory, Plot, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Potential spoilers for other episodes and expanded universe stories, Regret, Rumination, Spoilers for Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Tragic Romance, What-If, continuity cavalcade, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara Oswald’s life as regular human ended with a countdown. Now, fifty years after she lost the Doctor, another countdown threatens all of time and space. Is Clara ready to face the raven one last time? And does she really want to face it alone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Drink

**Author's Note:**

> This is a seven-chapter tale set post-Hell Bent (for Clara) and post-Husbands of River Song (the Doctor). For the Doctor it has been about a quarter century since he said goodbye to River. Clara has been travelling with Ashildr for about fifty years.
> 
> This is a very talky story in the spirit of writers like W. Somerset Maugham. Someone will say something and the narrative will go off on a tangent as they remember a past event. This story is my way of bringing the Doctor and Clara's immense history into some context and as the story goes on you will find references to audio, comics and novels as well as the TV show itself, plus a few things I've made up and I have also incorporated comments and opinions of the writers and actors in a few places as well. I've even managed to make reference to a few popular pieces of fan art and publicity photos. See if you can spot those references. And as for the fate of the clockwork squirrel ... well, that comes straight from Jenna Coleman's fall 2015 interview on Conan. I'm half expecting to have to add a concordance later!
> 
> Above all, though, I hope this story does the characters justice and provides yet another possible outcome for their incredible story. As this is my first posting to this site, and the first time I have written something of this length in about 20 years, apologies for any weird typos or plot holes that might emerge! I should note that I originally wrote this as one single uninterrupted story but have split it into chapters for convenient reading. The story itself was not paced for chapter breaks so I placed them at the closest convenient location (an exception being Chapter 4, which was added after the rest of the story was plotted out).

Clara Oswald stared at her drink and tried to remember what it tasted like.

Once upon a time, so long ago, she used to enjoy wine. It warmed her up and occasionally made her tipsy enough to forget whenever she’d had a rough day at school, or an argument with Danny Pink or … with _him_.

Now … it may as well be water. Still, she admitted to herself, they make strong wine on this planet — my tongue hasn’t tingled in a long time, but this stuff is doing the trick, though it took about half a glass. Weird. That isn’t usually supposed to happen.

Bland-tasting food and drink was one of many things she had learned to get used to since she was technically dead. Her heart sat frozen in her chest, her lungs only filling with air out of muscle memory and a habit she never bothered to break. She’d made a promise years ago to never use the Z word to describe herself, but that’s pretty much what she was. Not dead, but not totally alive, either. No craving for eating brains, though.

Not for the first time, she found herself cursing the Doctor. And not for the first time, she instantly regretted it. “Sorry, Doctor…” she muttered as she took another sip of the water-flavoured, yet strangely tongue-tingly pinot noir.

It had been half a century since she’d last seen the Time Lord, a man who no longer remembered her. The thought of that still made Clara immensely sad. He didn’t deserve the punishment she herself had orchestrated. Not intentionally, never intentionally, but, like so many things on that very bad day, nothing had gone as planned. 

No, that’s not quite fair, some things did go right. Instead of lying dead in a hidden alleyway in London, Clara was on some alien world she’d forgotten the name of already, “enjoying” some alien wine while her companion and fellow immortal, Ashildr, was off visiting a museum somewhere. And most … well, many … well, a reasonable number of days after she had left the Doctor had been good. This was just an off day. Who knew that tomorrow had in store, right? 

It was a lot of fun at first. Ashildr, who thanks to the Doctor was rendered functionally immortal back in the ninth century, had spent trillions of years living the slow path, eternally youthful. And then, when she lost the Doctor, Clara found herself not only with her own stolen TARDIS, but also with her own companion in Ashildr. And a few technical issues notwithstanding, she was still thinking and walking around. She could still enjoy life, even if she wasn’t really alive anymore.

And they had had a blast, travelling from world to world, from time to time, exploring and occasionally helping people in need. That seemed to be a new concept for Ashildr and it took some effort on Clara’s part to convince her that it was worthwhile. 

“We’re superheroes,” Clara once told her. “I can’t die until I return to Trap Street, you can pretty much only die if you fall into a sun or something, so let’s help people when we’re not killing time on planets where they celebrate new year’s for two centuries.”

Ashildr had gotten into the swing of it, and was responsible for saving many lives. But even so, Clara realized that, while Ashildr provided companionship, she just wasn’t the Doctor.

Beyond the physical aspects — although it admittedly took a while to get used to the stern-faced, grey-haired visage that had replaced the open-faced, joyful appearance of his predecessor, Clara had come to consider the Doctor ruggedly handsome, enough to make her heart (when it was still working) lilt a bit at the sight of him — it took her a long time to realize what she really missed the most about the Doctor. 

It was the hugs. 

From someone who proclaimed himself to be “not a hugger,” to someone who would embrace Clara without hesitation, and who enjoyed it just as much in return — especially those spontaneous, out-of-the-blue hugs that really meant so much more than three little words could convey — the Doctor becoming more affectionate was perhaps Clara’s proudest accomplishment.

Taking another swig of the wine, and this time realizing she could actually make out the taste now (man, this is strong wine, she thought again), Clara caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was loose and straight, her large brown eyes bright and shining. A small rose was stuck into her hair over her left ear. Her skin was virtually unblemished and smooth, and definitely did not resemble the skin of a woman who was technically well north of eighty.

The whole not-aging thing was one plus of being time-looped. In her former life, she’d been staring down her thirty-somethingth birthday the day she faced the raven and had started the ritual so many of her generation experienced of scanning her face every morning for that first grey hair, or that first wrinkle suggesting you’d laughed once too often. Both of which she could have seen herself developing after spending so much time with the Doctor. 

But now, she’d never have to worry about any of that. And her time with the Doctor had made her lean and strong; she had been in the best shape of her life on her last day as a regular human and this was now preserved, technically forever. Not just from all the running from Daleks and Cybermen, but she’d taken it on herself to train when she wasn’t with the Doctor. He never knew about the black belt she’d attained in judo in-between their adventures, nor that she also had one in tae kwon do. She was hoping to surprise him sometime by shoulder-throwing a Cyberman or body-slamming Missy, but she never got the chance. 

Not that her physical training hadn’t come in useful. On the planet the Doctor called the “second most beautiful” garden in the universe, a masterful act of derring-do on her part had literally saved his life only a few hours before she lost hers. Jumping off the side of a balcony perched a mile up, Clara had impressed the Doctor and herself by hanging one-handed as she connected two cables together to close a hatchway, saving them from having to deal with a sentient plant that wanted the Doctor for his, her, or its mate. He’d helped her up, but she was already halfway there. When they had returned to the TARDIS afterwards, they’d been giddy with adrenaline, and, if Clara didn’t know any better, she would have sworn the Doctor was even a little turned on as he prowled around the console with a smouldering look that burned right through her. She wouldn’t lie; she felt the same. There had been an increasing number of those moments since Clara rejoined the Doctor after that bizarre Christmas with the dream crabs, though they never seemed to take it further than gazing at each other, even when Clara had given him the signs that she was interested (like the time he told her to find a new relationship and didn’t process the fact that she already had and she was smiling at him). 

The Doctor never knew that she had finally decided to take matters into her own hands, pollen-covered dress or no, after the garden planet incident. She’d have started with reintroducing him to the idea of kissing (a step up from hugging) and see where it led from there. She even had an excuse prepared if he’d reacted negatively to being snogged (she was going to play dumb and pretend she was playing a joke or winning a bet with Osgood or overtaken by the influence of love pollen or something). She’d even had the TARDIS move her bedroom just outside the console room, just in case.

If only that damn phone call hadn’t changed everything. 

“Sorry, Rigsy,” Clara said aloud as she regretted cursing another friend now, too, as she ran her fingers through her hair. That wasn’t fair at all, she thought. You were a friend, in trouble, and of course you had to call us. And we had to help.

One thing she regretted was cutting her hair before the Trap Street fiasco. She’d done so after the dream crabs out of practicality; long, flowing locks didn’t go well when you were running down corridors, they tended to get caught in things like alien pincers, plus a few too many desert and jungle planets had made her realize how hot a heavy head of hair was. The Doctor seemed to like the shorter style, too, which was a bonus, and he’d developed a bit of a habit of sniffing her hair when they hugged. She never asked him about that and she wasn’t sure if he even realized he was doing it. It was a sensation she often remembered when she sat and thought about the Doctor for too long.

Clara also tried not to think about the fact that she had an appointment with death. Of course, everybody, eventually, had to face this, except maybe Ashildr. In her case, she knew the exact day and time and place. Someday, she’d have to go back. Face the raven. Die. 

It was an appointment Clara was in no hurry to meet. And it wasn’t because she was scared of dying — if she kept telling herself that, she hoped it would eventually become true, at any rate — it was because of the Doctor that she didn’t want to go back until the last possible moment. Because she knew what seeing her die did to him. 

Enhanced memory was one aspect of being immortal that was a curse, as Clara was able to relive, moment by moment, so much of her life before and after Trap Street. Something to do with her brain cells being time looped. She could gain new memories, new experiences and wisdom, but whatever was in place back on Trap Street were hard-wired in as well. No finite memory problems like that faced by Ashildr, who reacted to Clara’s ability with sympathy, not jealousy. “You’ll find it a curse, trust me,” she’d said with her usual optimism.

One still-vivid memory was from Gallifrey after she’d been reunited with the Doctor. When he’d told her, in the Cloisters, what he had gone through, the hell he’d put himself through, for four and a half billion years, just for a chance of undoing her death, all out of a “duty of care” which was as close to an “I love you” as the Doctor was likely to give her, Clara didn’t know whether to slug him or kiss him to death. She ended up doing neither. That wasn’t their style. Instead, she told him a secret. Something that she had kept bottled up for a long time. The Doctor had bowed his head, and for the first time, she’d seen tears. Just for a moment. She’d kissed his forehead then, stroked his face, and told him to open the trap door and get his arse to a TARDIS while she distracted the Time Lords.

She hadn’t needed to fake her outrage at what they’d forced the Doctor to endure. She hated them and she told them so. And then like a knight in, well, if not shining armour, at least something that looked like he’d stolen it from the set of an old TV western — knowing him, he probably had — the Doctor had swooped in and rescued her with a brand-new TARDIS.

And how they’d run — right to the end of the universe, in the most literal sense. She was heartbroken when she saw the Doctor gradually lose hope at keeping her alive. But he scared her too. He’d once told her about the time he became the Time Lord Victorious when he tried to save a soldier named Adelaide Brooke from a fixed-point death on Mars, and it had not ended well. And then Clara was faced with him in this dangerous mindset once again, shouting at her, and it wasn’t until it was almost too late for redemption that the Doctor realized he was hurting her. Clara was forced to play hardball — to threaten and to even scheme to be allowed to keep her memories. And she knew she was hurting him by doing so. They were too much alike — they knew how to push each other’s buttons to the extent that, if Clara hadn’t been aware of the Doctor’s complicated history with his wife, River Song, she could have easily seen herself as the Doctor’s wife at some point.

The Doctor had come to his senses, and Clara had forgiven him and she’d even offered him one last chance to forget the whole thing and just fly away with her. Clara had always loved the Doctor, but hearing the words “four and a half billion years” had changed something within her. She had once splintered herself into a million lifetimes out of her loyalty to the Doctor. The Doctor had paid that back a billion-fold. If the Doctor had said yes at that moment, she’d have stayed with him forever. He once joked to the Daleks, “Same old, same old, just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS.” But she hadn’t been joking when she invited the Doctor to elope with her instead of activating the neuroblock. “Why don’t we just fly away somewhere?” she had asked him. She might as well have asked, “Doctor, will you marry me?” And they both realized it. Everything had come to that moment. 

A brief moment, a fantasy.

“That would be great, wouldn’t it?” he had said. “God, yeah,” she had replied. 

For a second she had considered kissing him, but just as she had chosen not to during their first farewell on Trap Street, she knew if she did, or if she’d broken her promise to Danny and told the Doctor how much she loved him (as if her words to him in the Cloisters hadn’t already made that clear enough), neither of them would have had the courage to activate the neuroblock.

But a button had to be pushed and a memory erased. And seeing the Doctor collapse to the floor, his memory slipping away like sand through fingers… it hurt nearly as much as …

Clara shuddered and took a big swig of the wine and not for the first time wished she could get drunk again. Dammit, I wish I’d never pressed Ashildr into telling me what happened at the end on Trap Street. I wish I’d never asked her to always be truthful to me, no matter what. So my last words weren’t “Let me be brave” after all — instead, I screamed so loud, Ashildr was forced to retcon a bunch of cops who’d heard it outside in the “real world.” And apparently a few of her own citizens requested it as well because they’d been traumatized by it.

And the Doctor was right there, seeing it, helpless. No wonder he lost his mind. She knew the Doctor retained basic memories of their adventures; that was one memory she hoped was lost forever.

Sitting at the table, Clara absent-mindedly scratched at a sudden pinprick feeling just above her stomach. Maybe it was a side effect of the extraction, but occasionally Clara would find herself doubled over in pain. It would pass after a few seconds but, considering she wasn’t normally able to feel pain anymore, Ashildr surmised that she might be experiencing some sort of “flash-forward” phantom pain of her death since, technically, it hadn’t happened to her yet so a flash _back_ didn’t make sense. But since when did anything make sense anymore?

Normally, she couldn’t feel pain. A stab wound, a gunshot, closing a door on a finger, all of which she’d experienced over the years — it was just dullness to Clara. Sadly, being unable to feel pain meant she couldn’t feel the opposite, either. She had never been a particularly sexual person — Danny brought some of that out in her, but it was never a huge priority in her life (though with the Doctor — both of them — on a few occasions she would have gladly made it one, like after the garden planet, or on the _Orient Express_ when he’d looked so incredible in that train-car hallway, like Gary Cooper in that Audrey Hepburn film she loved). Small mercy then, considering that while she could still appreciate feeling the warmth of sun on her skin, or a cool breeze, and the comfort of a touch or a hug (in lieu of the Doctor, Ashildr was happy to give and receive the occasional embrace, though it wasn’t the same as Clara often felt she was being humoured rather than the friendship of the hug being appreciated), anything beyond that simply no longer registered. 

Not that she’d put that much effort into trying. Ashildr had suggested they visit a brothel at one point, both in terms of an experiment (at least that was Ashildr’s story and she was sticking to it) and also, as she so bluntly put it, to get the Doctor out of Clara’s system. As if that was going to happen. Fortunately, a Sontaran battlefleet decided to choose that moment to try a random invasion and Ashildr’s idea became moot when the brothel got blown up (after Clara and Ashildr got everyone to safety, of course; their TARDIS was decidedly not family-friendly for a while and, after the evacuation, Ashildr and Clara strongly considered activating the ship’s rarely used internal-flush-and-sanitize function). Regardless, Strax probably wondered why he received a big kiss on the top of his bald head the next time Clara saw him.

Another gulp of wine. Clara tried to get her mind out of the dark place. Look to the bright side: she was travelling the stars in her own (awesome) TARDIS, even though the cool factor of its chameleon circuit being stuck in the form of an American diner had worn off once they realized how it limited where they could actually land. 

Ashildr eventually fixed the thing, though not until Clara fulfilled an obligation to the Doctor’s timeline, parking it in Utah in 2011, hiring some part-time staff, and reconfiguring the interior to allow the bathrooms to actually be used as bathrooms (otherwise visitors would have wandered into the console room). 

She didn’t expect the Doctor to materialize his TARDIS inside the diner, though; it took some quick work on her and Ashildr’s part to avoid an accidental time-ram scenario, which would have been fatal to the Doctor, his companions, Clara, Ashildr and probably would have blown a hole in the earth’s crust. But it had worked out and Clara watched on a monitor as not one but two versions of the Doctor — the younger, bow-tie-wearing Doctor appeared twice over the course of a few hours but from his perspective some two hundred years had passed — met with Amy, Rory and his future wife, River. Clara had suppressed the urge to throw her waitress costume on again and just stand near the Doctor, serve him coffee, make eye contact. Ashildr told her in no uncertain terms that this would be dangerous and stupid. So she made do with a pleasant nod and a “hello” to Amy when she passed her in the hall on the way to the ladies room, at the same time reaffirming her earlier assessment that the Scottish lass was totally made of legs. Rory wasn’t bad to look at, either; she tried to imagine him with a beard for some reason, playing a superhero. River she remembered from Trenzalore, but this was a younger River, still a long way away from facing her own raven at the universe’s biggest library. 

That was then. Now, Clara’s TARDIS looked like a tree. Not quite the same cool factor as a diner, and a bit harder to spot in a forest, but easier to park. And you didn’t tend to get random people wandering in off the street looking for hamburgers or the toilet or men in suits asking why you didn’t have your certificate from the health board posted in a conspicuous place.

Clara glanced at the plate of crackers the waiter had provided with the drink and wished she could chow down on them. But she didn’t have to eat anymore — and in fact she couldn’t, because her body could no longer actually digest food. So no more sampling exotic alien crackers, even though these just looked disappointingly like regular saltines. She smiled when she remembered trying something alien for the first time back on Akhaten that first trip off-world after the Doctor had monked his way into her life. It looked like a sno-cone but tasted more like yellow snow. After that, though, she’d become something a space-food connoisseur. Or, at least, that used to be the case. At least she didn’t feel hungry, either.

But she still got thirsty and had to drink, she found. Liquids — like that final lemonade she shared with the Doctor in Nevada, and the wine she was tippling now — were absorbed by her body and helped to keep her from drying up. She might be nearly kinda dead, but she’d found out the hard way that she needed moisture to keep her joints lubricated, her tear ducts working (never mind the crying, without tears her vision took a major hit, she found), and even her tongue and throat moist just so that she could speak. It required her to drink about three litres of water or other fluids, like wine, a day, which proved to be a challenge that one time the TARDIS broke down on a desert planet — including its water producing plant. Things had gotten desperate before the ship was finally repaired and Ashildr actually broke their Z-word rule in describing how Clara looked and sounded for about a week after.

At least she didn’t have to stand on her head after taking a drink like that poor fellow Owen who used to work for Torchwood and found himself in a full-out undead state. She heard about him through Jack Harkness, a mutual acquaintance of both Ashildr and the Doctor. She found Jack fascinating and would have been a liar if she said she wasn’t attracted to him a little. Jack had flirted with her mercilessly and even offered to help her figure out a workaround to her inability to feel physical pleasure. Any other guy making such a proposition would have gotten a slap in the face. But Jack was so damn charming and boyish, she let him get away with it. She turned him down, of course, but she had been damn tempted. If it had been the Doctor sitting close and touching her knee as he made the provocative suggestion, then she might have considered it.

Once she’d shot down his idea, however, she found Jack to be more of a kindred spirit. Especially when she learned Jack shared many of the feelings she’d had for the Doctor. When she told Jack about her adventures borrowing his vortex manipulator and meeting not one but three Doctors, he was enraptured. Jack was also convinced he’d met Clara before, possibly aboard the Game Station, the satellite in earth orbit in the fifth millennium where Jack had been exterminated by a Dalek, only to be revived by Rose Tyler when she became the Bad Wolf entity; the side effect of this for him was immortality. But he said there was no way that could have been Clara; that girl he witnessed was ginger for one thing and he saw her throw herself in front of a Dalek that was about to shoot the Doctor. Jack did remember her eyes and said Clara had the same large, dark pools that could express a whole sentence with a glance. He also remembered the gist of her bizarre last words, something about a clever boy running and remembering, which had made no sense. He seemed a bit puzzled why a seasoned adventurer like Clara suddenly started crying, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him. Let him think she was just a softie. For Clara, though, it was more blood on her account sheet. Another version of herself dead in order to protect the Doctor from the Great Intelligence’s scheme to destroy his timeline.

Clara tried not to think about her echoes. All those women — and, she discovered to her surprise, a few _men_ — who sacrificed so much just so the Doctor would live. She carried the guilt of her echoes for a long time until she and the Doctor encountered one in the mid-twenty-first century down in, of all places, Antarctica. That was when she discovered that not all of her echoes actually died, that some — hopefully many, hopefully most — had full and complete lives before and, most importantly, after being there when the Doctor needed them. But she still grieved when she learned of the ones that gave their lives. 

Worst of all, the Doctor never knew about most of them. He told her after he’d rescued her from his timestream that he had vague, foggy memories of some, but many made their contributions without the Doctor even being aware of them (like Jack’s ginger version of Clara). A fact that made both of them sad and she recalled how the two had shared a drink in their memory, something that was remarkable given how bow-tie Doctor usually refused to touch alcohol, though she got the sense it was for her benefit more than his. Now, of course, Clara assumed that even those foggy memories were probably long-erased.

The months after that first visit to Trenzalore were not easy. At the Doctor’s insistence, Clara entered a sort of therapy to help her come to terms with what had happened. Needless to say, splitting into thousands of doppelgangers creates a form of PTSD not covered under most health insurance plans, so instead Kate Stewart of UNIT put her in touch with Sarah Jane Smith, the grande dame of the Doctor’s former companions. They shared many happy, sometimes tearful hours together, reminiscing about their shared experiences. And it was actually Sarah Jane who first said out loud to her how much alike the Doctor and Clara appeared, adding this was both a comfort and a little disturbing. Her last words to Clara before they mutually agreed that there was no more Sarah Jane could do to help Clara were: “Don’t fall in love with him.” Much like the Doctor, though, Clara didn’t always listen to people. 

She’d also spent a month in Victorian London living with Vastra, Jenny and Strax. It had been Clara’s idea, as she thought time spent away from her century, but not being chased by monsters or mad dictators might do some good. Even without the Doctor, though, she found herself engaged in an adventure or two. She’d helped Vastra, Jenny and Strax take down the Marylebone Masher (along the way learning some handy lock-picking skills from Jenny), and she even joined Strax in helping out a pair of eccentric elderly amateur detectives named Henry Gordon Jago and George Litefoot. It wasn’t till near the very end of their adventure that she learned they’d known the Doctor back when he was all teeth and curls. 

One good thing that came out of the therapy and her retreat to Victorian London was Clara’s decision to become a schoolteacher and she’d spent the next couple of happy years learning the craft. Unfortunately, it meant she had to restrict her travels with the Doctor to the occasional bank holiday weekend. The Doctor had been sad about this, but they soon realized that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was an actual thing, and if anything their time together became all the more special for it. When she got her job as a teacher, she tried to keep this going and it worked very well, at least until Clara rejoined the Doctor after the dream crabs. Although she had to separate from him in order to fulfill her obligations to Coal Hill School, in the months prior to Trap Street, she found herself spending more and more time with the Doctor.

Clara still occasionally received text messages from Winnie Clarence, the echo she’d met in Antarctica. Last she heard she’d married some fellow and had a son. She hadn’t the heart to tell her her “twin” was texting a dead woman, and rarely replied to the messages once she found out that Winnie’s husband’s last name was Pink and that he was distantly related to Danny. Clara had used the TARDIS’ computer to do some research and confirmed that Winnie’s great-grandson would be Orson Pink, the explorer the Doctor and Clara had rescued from the edge of time and who had resembled Danny in so many ways. How Winnie’s family came to be in possession of Danny’s toy soldier — something Clara had given the young Danny when he was in an orphanage — was a mystery, but what was no longer a mystery to her was how Orson seemed to recognize her when they first met, since Winnie was one of the “doppelganger” echoes (as opposed to those with different hair, ages, even ethnicities. She’d seen a photo of one of her echoes who had been born in Zaire and thought she had looked amazing with ebony skin). Even better, it removed one worry Clara had carried with her since Danny sacrificed himself; she knew time could be rewritten and she’d been deathly afraid that with Danny gone before they’d had a chance to have children, dear Orson would never have existed. 

After losing the Doctor, Clara considered trying to track down more of her echoes, to see how they had got on. She’d encountered a few, like the Zairian Clara, but made sure not to reveal her identity. Over the course of two weeks she successfully tracked down what she called her “ground zero” echoes — Oswin Oswald of the _Starship Alaska_ , and Clara Oswin Oswald, a barmaid in Victorian London who was trying to rise above her station by impersonating an upper-class nanny. She had a special place for these two women because she knew they were the ones directly responsible for bringing the Doctor to her.

Clara knew the score; she knew that if she interfered in any way with either of these women she likely would have never met the Doctor and all of time and space would have collapsed. Ashildr volunteered to say hello on her behalf, but Clara would have none of it. So she watched from a distance as Oswin boarded the _Alaska_ for the fateful flight that would end with a shipwreck on the Dalek asylum planet and her being converted into a Dalek, enduring madness as she created a fantasy world to deal with the pain. And she and Ashildr watched from around the corner as Clara Oswin examined a bizarre-looking snowman alongside … him. Ashildr had had to hold Clara back from stopping Clara Oswin from chasing after the Doctor’s carriage, knowing full well that in just over a day the vivacious young woman, so full of life and energy — a woman the Doctor would fall in love with at first proper sight — would be dead. When she’d lived with Vastra, Clara had considered retracing the steps of this other Clara, but didn’t have the courage.

It was in Oswin and Clara Oswin’s memory, and that of all the others, that Clara now wore a rose over her left ear. 

There was about finger left of the wine and Clara swallowed it down. Wow, she thought, that was some glass of wine. I can’t believe I could taste it.

Impressed to finally find something that could trigger her taste buds, Clara was about to order another (another side benefit of her condition; inebriation was impossible) when her mobile rang. It was the first time in years that she’d heard the retro-style ringer go off. It was the same phone she’d had that day on Trap Street. Like all her phones, the Doctor had “upgraded” it so that it could be used to call him on the TARDIS anywhere in time and space. And anyone wanting to call her back home — her gran, UNIT — could reach her too. She didn’t know why she kept it, as it was torture every time she looked at the speed dial list, which was filled with people she could never contact again: the Doctor (maybe she hoped he’d call), Gran, Dad (Why would they call her? To them she was dead.) … she even still had Danny’s mobile number programmed in. She didn’t have the heart to delete it. For several weeks after Danny died, she’d occasionally call it and let it ring through to his Cloud-stored voicemail greeting, just to hear his voice again. And then one day she called and a little kid answered the phone. The number had been reassigned. That was a bad day. 

There had been a lot of bad days after she lost Danny, especially after she’d let the Doctor leave her with a terrible lie that Danny had returned from whatever afterlife Missy had trapped him in, and had come back. And then there was that Christmas when Danny — or her subconscious pretending to be Danny, at any rate — gave her permission to move on. She still took the requisite five minutes each day to think about Danny, and then she got on with life. And for a long time, that life had included the Doctor. She’d long since added another five minutes for him, too, though as long as she knew he was out there, somewhere, it wasn’t quite as sad. But he was doing things without her — adventures, exploring, maybe even falling in love … that made her sad. And jealous as hell. Whatever the Doctor did to her phone, it no longer needed charging and continued to work perfectly five decades later. Having the Doctor on speed dial, even though she could never bring herself to dial it, felt like she still had a connection to him. One day, she’d call that number again. 

The call display said: “Blocked number.” Clara froze at the sight. That was never a good sign. Especially since the Doctor said that it was impossible for that to happen on her phone. Cautiously, as if the mobile might blow up in her face, she answered. “Hello?”

“They’re coming for you.” It was a woman’s voice, Scottish-accented.

Of all people Clara never wanted to hear from again, Missy was top of the list.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on working out ages given on screen, a calendar year reference given in “In the Forest of the Night,” (which though it aired in 2014 is said in dialogue to take place in 2016) and factoring in “Last Christmas,” and the time jump between the end of Series 7 and “The Day of the Doctor,” I am of the opinion that Clara was in her early thirties by the events of “Face the Raven” (much as Amy was a number of years older than Karen Gillan at the end of her time). There’s some wiggle room on this, but in my opinion I think Clara was possibly as old as thirty-two by the time of her death. I don’t give an explicit age, but just in case anyone wonders why I say she is “north of eighty” which might not work out in the math for some, this is why.


	2. The Countdown

“Who gave you this number?” Clara demanded.

Missy chuckled at the other end of the line. “You gave it to me, don’t you remember? Or maybe I nicked it when you were too busy considering whether to toss your panties at Dream Boy while he was channelling Roy Orbison back at that castle.”

“Whatever.” It was only a momentary thought. She’d never have tossed her panties at the Doctor for any reason. In public, at any rate; there was that one time where the mood lighting and his accent sparked the temptation, though. And how did Missy know, anyway? “Who’s coming for me? The Time Lords?”

“You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“OK, so care to tell me something I haven’t been aware of for decades? That’s not exactly breaking news, Missy.”

Sadly, that was true. Although the Doctor had given her an immense gift, he’d also saddled her with the burden of knowing the Time Lords would spend eternity chasing her in order to drag her back to the extraction chamber. “I’m just taking the long way ‘round,” unfortunately, wasn’t a good enough excuse. Clara knew this because she’d actually contacted them once to tell them not to worry: she would shoulder her responsibility and return to Trap Street, someday. But they didn’t trust her. She’d spent too much time with the Doctor and by this time they’d pretty much come to the same realization as Ashildr: that the feared Hybrid was not a half-Dalek/half-Time Lord creation, but was actually a metaphor for the ultimate power couple — the Doctor and Clara. She didn’t know if it was true, but she enjoyed seeing the Time Lords squirm after what they did to the Doctor so she’d played it up for all it was worth. Which didn’t help matters anyway, unfortunately.

“How do you know about my current … status?” Clara asked Missy.

After she had left the Doctor in Nevada the first time, she’d made sure to tell UNIT everything so that they were able to destroy (or, at least, hide from the Doctor) all records of her existence, including the surveillance images from the Black Archive. (In return, Clara promised to help UNIT when she could if the Doctor wasn’t available. A promise she fulfilled a number of times.) She had to stop herself from contacting her family. That was the hardest part. There were also those terrible, sad minutes where she cradled the Doctor after he passed out in the TARDIS, his memory of her gone, crying her throat raw. And what Clara did to Ashildr after the Doctor passed out … Trap Street, the Doctor’s billions of years of torture, then losing him forever came to a boil … Ashildr forgave her. Fortunately the Viking girl healed fast.

She also made a few other visits to say goodbye to people she could get away with meeting (and who once again needed to know about the Doctor before they saw him again). Vastra and Jenny were heartbroken; Clara didn’t even know Silurians could cry. Strax tried to figure out a way to restart her heart, ironically using the same device he’d once used to keep Clara Oswin alive for a while and bring Jenny back to life after the Whispermen had killed her, but they both knew it was fruitless, with Strax raging in frustration nearly as viciously as the Doctor had, to the point of declaring war against death itself on behalf of the glorious Sontaran Empire.

And she also paid a visit to Ian Chesterton, the chairman of Coal Hill School, an aged yet seemingly ageless man who Clara knew had once travelled with the Doctor. When she joined the school, she had had a sneaking suspicion of a favour being called in considering she so quickly got hired full-time after leaving teacher’s college, though Ian denied it, of course. The two had had long conversations about their adventures with their mutual friend. Interestingly, Clara discovered that love often blossomed aboard the TARDIS even in those early days. Ian had fallen in love with Barbara Wright, a fellow teacher, and they eventually married and spent many happy years together before she’d passed away only a few years before Clara joined Coal Hill. Even the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, had found love, as did another traveller named Vicki. Ian and Clara shared one boisterous Sunday afternoon enjoying his recollection of the time the Doctor found himself accidentally courting an Aztec woman. Unfortunately, this was during the Doctor and Clara’s “rough patch” that they endured for a while after he’d regenerated, and so she never really found opportunity to bring any of this up with him. When she returned to see Ian after her death, she was afraid she’d give the old man a heart attack as he had attended her funeral, but was pleasantly surprised when he just said, “Wouldn’t be the first time this has happened,” and left it at that before showing Clara where a lovely tribute wall had been erected in memory of her and Danny Pink. They agreed that it was in everyone’s best interests that she never return to Coal Hill, but Ian said she was always welcome to visit him.

But all that aside, the one person she would never have contacted was Missy.

Missy huffed. “I ran into your former boyfriend — the not-dead one — and when I wasn’t trying to kill him for some reason slips my mind I happened to notice he was missing something. At first I thought he’d forgotten one of his shoes, or to shave, and then I realized you weren’t there. In more ways than one. He told me more or less what happened. Google did the rest. You’d think UNIT would have been more original in their cover story. Brain aneurysm while out for a jog? Please. True, for a few hours you were at the top of the _Daily Mail_ next to a gallery of Kardashian selfies and a story about some hunk from _Game of Thrones_ dating some cupcake from _Emmerdale_ , so you can’t say you didn’t accomplish anything with your life. But Danny Boy, now he had a sense of the dramatic.”

Clara by this time had already left the pub and was headed for her TARDIS with the longest strides she could muster without running. Where the hell was Ashildr? They might need to take off quickly. Again. And she hadn’t even gotten the name of the wine that she had been able to actually taste.

“If you’re just going to insult me or the people I love I’m ending this conversation now.” Clara winced when she realized she’d used “people” as a plural. Her feelings for the Doctor were none of Missy’s concern and she didn’t even want to give her a hint of confirmation, even though she had grinned like a Cheshire cat right in front of Missy when the Doctor had started to play “Pretty Woman” just for her. At least the fact she no longer needed to breathe meant she didn’t sound like she was in the midst of getting the hell out of Dodge. “Get to the point. Why are you calling me?”

“Because if there’s anything else I hate in this world more than … anything in this world … it’s those stuffed shirts on Gallifrey. You’ve given them collective migraines for decades. So I’m passing along a message from them because Gallifrey’s run out of Tylenol. And I guess they figured you’re less likely to think this is some kind of trick coming from me.”

“You’ve got to be joking. I’ll never forgive you for putting me in that Dalek. Trying to trick me into saying ‘Exterminate’ so the Doctor would shoot me dead. Did you get off on that? Did you really think I’d fall for that?”

“You have to admit, it was clever. How was I to know you found another way to say, ‘I love you’ to the Doctor?”

Clara didn’t bother responding to that. If Missy had been paying attention back at the graveyard she’d have heard Clara make her promise to Danny about never saying, “I love you” to anyone else. Not even to the Doctor and God knows she nearly broke that promise many times. And even though she was scared that Doctor might kill her at any moment back on Skaro, she realized the game Missy was playing. Say “I love you” and the Dalek says “Exterminate!” and the Doctor was hard-wired to put a hole in her before she’d have gotten past the first syllable. Even without the promise she’d made, she knew she could never say it and live.

So yes, she told the Doctor she loved him in other ways. She tried, “You’re everything to me” but the Dalek said something else. She tried, “I want to be with you forever,” and the Dalek strangely said nothing. Then she told the Doctor she’d never ever consider killing him, and that did the trick. “Mercy!” came out of the Dalek’s vocal processor and the Doctor knew something wasn’t right. After telling Missy to go to hell and releasing Clara from the Dalek casing, the Doctor had kissed her on the forehead and hugged her close — something he used to do back in his earlier life and for Clara it was the best feeling in the world. It was one of many times during the final months of her life that Clara wished she’d never made that promise to Danny — and she wished the Doctor would just come out and say it himself, but he could never bring himself to say it, not even to River Song, and she was his wife. This she knew from talking to River’s data ghost on Trenzalore.

“Enough, Missy. Give me the message.”

“I suppose it’s good news and bad news. The good news is they’ve determined that within a very short period of time, you’ll be fully alive again. Your heart will start pumping, your juices will start flowing, you’ll probably have to pee like there’s no tomorrow …”

Clara stopped dead in her tracks. “What did you say?” 

“Yeah, apparently the drunkard who designed the extraction chamber didn’t think to make it to keep people alive more than a few hours, never mind decades. So time is healing, as they say, just not the way it was expected.”

Clara’s smile was so broad, she thought her face would crack. 

“Stop smiling,” Missy said (OK, Clara thought, that was scary). “You haven’t heard the bad news yet.”

“Alright, then.”

“The moment your little human heart starts beating, the universe, your lover boy the Doctor, your girlfriend the writer, your whatever-the-hell-she-is companion, Danny Boy and everything else now, yesterday and tomorrow will cease to exist.”

“What are you telling me, Missy?”

“I’m telling you your little joyride is over. You must return to Gallifrey, because you have an appointment with the Reaper and until then you are — and I don’t think this term has ever been used so literally before — a time bomb.”

***

Clara had no idea how she found her way back to the TARDIS. After Missy had hung up (if Clara let her imagination go wild she could almost think Missy was misty-eyed as she said “We will not speak again” before ringing off), she’d just slumped against a fence and stared into space. “We all have to face the raven, that is the deal,” she remembered telling Ashildr so long ago. She’d told her something else too, that she wasn’t scared. Another one of her lies.

She didn’t want to go. Not after so many adventures, so much fun. And she had unfinished business. She hadn’t gotten the Doctor back yet. She still hoped there was some way she could get him to remember her, and what she’d told him in the Cloisters. 

“Why can’t you just see me?” she remembered the Doctor pleaded with her, not long after he’d changed. Clara had been so unfair to him then. Part of it was the shock. She’d seen his other faces and she knew he could be old-looking and young-looking, and that hadn’t bothered her. In fact she’d found the older Doctor who’d abandoned his own name downright sexy, though she was too much of a lady back then to say so (and given the circumstances it really wasn’t appropriate). She just never thought that _her_ Doctor, the one she fell in love with, would change on her. 

Vastra’s dressing down had been as deserved as a slap in the face. She nearly lost the Doctor then. And as it was she pushed him away. “Clara, I’m not your boyfriend,” he was forced to say. And she’d lied, again. “I never thought you were,” even though he said it was his mistake in believing it. There he was right in front of her telling her how he felt and she was telling him she wanted to go home. “Why can’t you just see me?” The fact he had to even ask that made her ashamed. 

And then in the diner that was almost all she could think about. Those words. Dammit, Doctor, why can’t you just see me? It got to the point where Clara started to hope her newfound status came with psychic ability. But it didn’t, and he told her, to her face, that if he ever saw Clara again, he’d absolutely know. But he didn’t see her. He couldn’t see her. That got her like a boot in the stomach and she’d said a quiet thank you to Amy and Rory for mentally distracting the Doctor in his intact memories, which gave her a chance to stop from grabbing him by the collar and shouting “It’s me, for God’s sake. Look at me! I love you and I’m right in front of you!”

For a long while she hoped the Doctor was lying to her — that he actually had kept his memories and was doing the old martyr act to get her to go on her way without him. She actually confided in Osgood about this, but when the Doctor next met her, Osgood tested him to see if he truly had erased her memories, including using some alien tech UNIT had reverse engineered as a form of lie detector. The Doctor passed with flying colours. The erasure was genuine. That had been a bad day for Clara, who had hoped she was right.

So yeah, she had lied to Ashildr. It was another one of her whoppers, delivered with a smile and a devil-may-care attitude not that different from the afternoon she told the Doctor that Danny was alive again and to go off and find Gallifrey. She had lied about not being scared. She was petrified. She said she was going back to the Gallifrey the long way around, but she was really just running.

At last, Clara arrived at a nondescript tree with a Day-Glo-pink post-it note affixed to the trunk. An afternoon lost among Roman columns looking for the one with the magic door leading into another dimension had given her a hard-earned lesson in marking her disguised TARDIS for easy identification.

To Clara’s relief, Ashildr was waiting inside, sipping a lemonade while flipping through a copy of _War and Peace_. (The diner façade might have been dropped, but Ashildr and Clara had kept the diner interior intact. Made introductions that much more fun.) Outwardly, she had the appearance of a dark-haired teenager with a slightly exotic look about her eyes. In fact she was actually an immortal who by this point in her immense life was so old that numbers were utterly meaningless. She was so old she became used to calling herself, simply, Me or Lady Me since she gained a few legitimate titles over the years. But she let Clara call her Ashildr, her birth name, mainly because Clara refused to call her Me, for some reason.

Ashildr looked up and saw the expression on Clara’s face. Frankly, it was an expression she had never wanted to see again.

“What is it, Clara?”

Clara strode towards her friend and hugged her tightly. This was unusual, Ashildr thought. Clara wasn’t really the hugging sort anymore. “What’s wrong?”

Clara broke away and gave her a sad smile. “All good things must come to an end, Ashildr.”

“What’s happened?”

Clara told her what Missy had said. Ashildr scoffed. “Since when do you believe anything that creature has to say?”

“Since I realized I can taste things again.”

“What?”

“Pour me a lemonade,” said Clara. Ashildr did and Clara took a big gulp of it. Before Missy’s phone call, she would have been overjoyed to realize she could notice the tartness on her tongue again. Now, it terrified her.

“That’s what I was afraid of. I just enjoyed a strong glass of wine back at the pub, too, before I realized how bad that really was.” And then, before Ashildr could stop her, she’d taken a sharp knife from a nearby rack and poked herself on the back of her hand. Clara gasped and tossed the knife roughly into the sink.

“And I feel pain again. Just great.”

“Clara, you know what this means?”

“It means I have to return to Gallifrey.” Clara looked at the back of her hand. There was a small hole where the tip of the knife had gone in, but no red fluid was emerging. “Well the good news is I’m not bleeding, yet.” She headed through a door with a garish life-sized portrait of Elvis and into the gleaming white of the console room.

“You need a beating heart for that,” Ashildr said. “And once it starts, the time loop will have dissolved. That can’t be allowed to happen.”

“I know.”

At this point Ashildr asked Clara a question that shocked her to the core, because it was something she’d never expected her friend to ask. For a half century they had avoided the subject, because they both new the risks, and why they could never even consider it. But now Ashildr asked: “Clara, do you want to find the Doctor?”

“What?”

“If we’re returning to Gallifrey, you know what that means. Do you want to see him again? You love him.” With that, Ashildr smiled a little.

“How do you know I still love him?” Clara felt like she was blushing, though she knew if she ever got to that point, the universe would be in big trouble. “I’ve never actually said that. To anyone. And it’s been fifty years. Maybe my feelings have changed.”

“Clara, I saw through it when the Doctor lied to me about you being just a friend, and I can tell when someone’s hiding their feelings. I know that what you and the Doctor did with the neuroblock was as much as statement of love for each other as anything I’ve seen and I’m not even going to start with what the Doctor did for you in the confession dial. And I know you were lying to me when you said you weren’t scared. Do you remember that night we shared a tent on Alpha Dorn IV? You started speaking in your sleep and you were saying how much you loved the Doctor and missed him how you wanted to stay with him forever and you didn’t want the raven to kill you. And you were crying. That was two months ago. And it wasn’t the first time.”

Clara had a vague memory of the dream, a nightmare, really. They’d pressed the button, the neuroblock had activated, and the Doctor had begun to die right in front of her. She’d watched, terrified, as the Doctor reverted back through his regenerations, the bow-tie man that she’d loved as much as the current Doctor, going back through to the very first Doctor, who became younger and younger before her eyes until he resembled the young boy she’d comforted in the barn so long ago. And then, he was gone, and she was left all alone. Just as he’d been all alone for billions of years. And then the raven had appeared, its face a blood-red skull.

She blinked away the memory and tried to make a joke out of it. “OK, embarrassed now.”

“Please, don’t be. I’ve been giving this thought — and I think there’s no danger in you at least trying to see him before we return. You need him by your side. You said he still has many memories of you, just not what made him fall in love with you, basically.”

“No.” Clara turned her attention towards the console, and started flicking switches. “No way, I can’t. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t put him through that again. Yes, OK, I still love him. Very much. There, I’ve said it, happy now? He’s better off forgetting me. For all our sakes, but primarily for his. It’s bad enough that when I return to Trap Street I’m going to make his earlier self go through billions of years of hell…” Clara slammed her hand into the console and felt the sudden pain as her palm landed on a flipper switch. “Damn it!” She recoiled in shock, the curse borne more of disappointment than discomfort. “That hurt. It’s not supposed to hurt. No arguments. We have to hurry.”

***

Billions of years into the future, Clara’s TARDIS materialized in a grand vestibule at the heart of Gallifrey’s Citadel. Truth be told, neither she nor Ashildr really knew where to park, though both agreed landing back in the Cloisters would have been a bad idea, for a number of reasons. They figured of all worlds where a timeship suddenly appearing in the middle of a public place would be seen as par for the course, it would be the planet that wrote the book on time travel.

It was equally not surprising that there was already a group of armed guards waiting; nothing gets past these people, Clara thought as she and Ashildr emerged from the TARDIS, Clara noting with disappointment that it had reverted to its original cylindrical form. She’d actually set the circuit to be the diner again, just to be a pain in the ass, but there must have been an override of some sort.

She recognized the fierce features of the General straight away. Blimey, she thought, Grace Jones is like Heidi compared to you.

“Ms. Oswald. I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to see you again, but that wouldn’t be appropriate at this moment,” the General said.

“No it wouldn’t,” Ashildr interjected before Clara could say anything. “My friend has come here to die. Remember that.”

The General nodded. “My apologies if I sounded disrespectful, Ms. Oswald.” She looked Clara up and down for a moment. The human’s leather jacket and pantsuit stood in sharp contrast to the battle armour and high-necked robes of the surrounding Time Lords. 

“Forgive me, but you are not wearing the same clothes you wore last time. You need to look the same as when you were extracted.”

“I know. I want to speak to the person in charge first and I don’t want to be hustled into the death chamber before I have to.”

The General said, “Follow me,” and Clara and Ashildr were escorted to a glass-enclosed lift that took them up and up, seemingly miles into the sky. Clara had never gotten a good view of Gallifrey before — just the catacombs and the inside of a barn, as well as a battleground back when she’d helped three Doctors end the Time War. She might have found the view breathtaking … if she’d still had any breath to take. Why she smiled a little at that puzzled her. “Hey, Clara,” her inner voice said. “Don’t you realize you are about to die? Why are you making jokes at a time like this?”

Then a gruff voice in a thick Scottish accent cut across her memories: “Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny.”

That’s why, she thought.

They arrived at an ornate meeting hall dominated by a twenty-foot-long table. A gaggle of Time Lords sat at the far end, the large chair at its head occupied by a smile-scowling middle-aged woman with a twinkle in her eye and a purple shawl over her head. Clara recognized her from the Cloisters, as well. She’d been the one to break the news to her about how long the Doctor had been trapped in the confession dial. And she’d been one of the people she’d directed her fury towards.

The woman got up as the General approached. “Just keeping it warm for you, General.” The General glared at her and took her place at the end of the table. The words “old married couple” formed in Clara’s mind. Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny, he had said.

“Ms. Oswald,” the General began, “this is what’s left of the High Council of Time Lords. And I believe you have already met Ohila, leader of the Sisterhood of Karn.”

Ohila clasped Clara’s hand with both of hers, surprisingly friendlier than she was a moment earlier, or back in the Cloisters when she demanded the Doctor face her. “We weren’t properly introduced last time.”

“Yeah, about that…” Clara began. She still hated the Time Lords for what they did to the Doctor. But she also felt some remorse at the hatred she herself had expressed to both Ohila and the General, because she knew they weren’t the ones ultimately responsible, and the General’s previous male incarnation had been quite kind to her in the extraction chamber. She sat down at a seat midway down the table.

Ohila seemed to read Clara’s thoughts and her uncertainty. “We deserved every word of what you said. And yes, the Time Lords are hated by many.” The General scowled at that. “If they’d known that the Doctor was playing them to save you, they’d have never allowed him to go through that agony once, never mind billions of times. But I’ve learned that two hearts are unpredictable, even more so when they are intertwined with a third.” Note to self, Clara thought: may as well have put an announcement in the _Times_. Everyone knows. Except him, sadly.

The General spoke up. “Ms. Oswald, what do you want to know? We estimate you only have about three days by your reckoning before your body functions resume, causing catastrophic paradox.”

Clara tried not to look too shocked. But being given a timeframe for her death still got her.

“OK, there’s plenty I can do in a few days. Read a book, finally make a soufflé properly, anyone here know how _Game of Thrones_ ends? Book or TV series, I’m not choosy. I think Arya’s gonna be on the Iron Throne when all is said and …”

“Clara, you’re rambling,” Ashildr said. It was a Doctor-like trait she’d picked up about 25 years earlier — rambling like the Doctor when she was nervous. “I’m really sorry, so sorry.”

“Will you stop saying that?” Clara was proper angry now. “This is my life, Ashildr. If anyone’s gonna be sorry, it’ll be me. And I’m not. I’ve had a good innings. The Doctor gave me a gift. Remember what I said: we all face the raven in the end, that’s the deal.”

“But you know what will happen.”

“Yes. But it’ll be quick, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Then fine. Danny must have been in incredible pain when he was converted into a Cyberman. The Doctor spent billions of years punching through a diamond wall with his fists because he loved me. I see him crying out in agony each time I think about that. There are so many people he and I failed to save, that you and I failed to save, who endured a lot more pain. My echoes. I owe all of them to die like I mean it.”

“Yet you are scared,” said Ashildr.

“More than any other time in my life.” Clara turned to the General. “Is there truly no other way?”

The General shook her head. “Ms. Oswald, although we do not approve of what the Doctor did, and we knew you had to eventually return to your timestream, we are aware of the good work you have done – both with Ms. Ashildr…”

Ashildr played the regal card for the first time in awhile. She wasn’t going to buddy up to these people.

“Lady Me, if you please. Only Clara and the Doctor get to call me Ashildr.”

“My apologies, Lady Me. I meant no disrespect.” The General continued. “The work you have done, both with Lady Me and the Doctor. As long as you proved willing to eventually return, we were willing to cast a blind eye, er, after a while.”

Clara smiled. “Yeah, I felt like a time-travelling Dr. Richard Kimble for decades.”

“Dr. who?” the General responded and Clara smiled at the unexpected invoking of the Doctor’s favourite private joke. The first time he met her he’d asked her to repeat “Doctor Who” several times, like it was a magic incantation of some sort. Guess it really was, she thought, as it made her life magical from that point forward.

The General didn’t return the smile. “This is the only way, Ms. Oswald. If your body processes return, the Hybrid prophecy will come true, a billion billion lives will be destroyed if you are not on Trap Street to end in front of the Doctor back in the twenty-first century.”

Dammit, you didn’t have to say “end in front of the Doctor,” Clara thought as she glared at the General. Ashildr did the same, because she also felt it was an unfair thing to mention, knowing Clara’s guilt over what lay ahead for the Doctor.

“How do I prepare?” Clara felt a lot calmer than she likely should be. The benefit of having no heartbeat; it had come in handy on a few tight occasions.

“Please return to your TARDIS and change into the outfit you were originally wearing. You should also make sure your hair and make-up are as close as possible as well,” said the General.

Ohila leant forward and slid a small tablet computer towards Clara and Ashildr. “These are high-resolution surveillance images taken of you when you were extracted, to help you replicate your look,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be 100-per cent exact; time will fill in the rough edges when the timestream resumes.”

Clara scanned through the images. Memories of years ago returned as she saw how confused she looked, at the Doctor’s growing desperation. There was one image that looked as if the Doctor was about to hug her, but she remembered how she’d rebuffed it. “Yes, it matters to me!” she’d said when the Doctor refused to answer how she could still be walking about. What she hadn’t thought of was how much it mattered to the Doctor that he wanted to hold her. Sadly, things had moved so swiftly that they’d never had much of a chance. Except in the cloisters. One reason she didn’t want the Doctor here now was she knew she’d hug him and never let go.

There was a particularly clear shot of the Doctor. Ashildr watched as Clara zoom-pinched the image so the Doctor’s rugged face filled the screen. Clara stared at the image, her eyes becoming moist.

“I’d forgot how desperate, how lonely he was. He almost wasn’t the Doctor anymore.” Her voice was low and throaty.

The Doctor’s arm was stretched directly in front of him, a sidearm aimed directly at the General, Clara looking frightened and confused as she watched her friend sink to a new level of desperation. Clara knew this image was taken not long before he shot the General, causing her to regenerate. Clara had tried to stop him, holding onto one of his fingers, like she’d done the night they’d actually almost kissed back on the _Orient Express_ in space. They’d clinked glasses to their “last hurrah” and Clara had found herself grasping the Doctor’s hand and she nearly rose up on tiptoes to kiss the Doctor. What made it surreal was she was technically “breaking up” with him. She’d been confused at the time, trying to keep both the Doctor and Danny in her life. After the near-kiss in the hallway she’d taken a cold shower and phoned Danny to try and break the spell. It worked for a while and the Doctor being rather cold and calculating with Maisie didn’t hurt either, but then she realized how wrong she’d been about the Doctor, how addicted she truly was to the travel, to the adventure — and to the Doctor. Her fate was sealed when she phoned Danny later and said “I love you,” only to realize that she hadn’t said it to Danny. She’d said it to the Doctor, though he never realized. What was supposed to be an ending ended up as a new beginning.

Clara blinked away the memory and took the tablet with her as she and Ashildr returned to the TARDIS.

An hour later, they were done. Clara looked the spitting image of how she’d been a half century earlier when the Doctor extracted her. A simple grey, form-fitting blouse with frills at the bottom and cuffs covered her from neck to hip and was intentionally an inch or so too long at the wrists, making her hands partially disappear under the fabric. A pair of tight black jeans and a pair of stylish sneakers with a sneaky heel lift that she’d had added so the Doctor wouldn’t tower over her so much. She even managed to find the earrings she was wearing after a brief fright thinking they had been lost. (Good thing they weren't; Clara had bequeathed them to one of her teaching friends.) One accessory that was easy to find was the white lanyard with the key to the Doctor’s TARDIS tied to it. She’d never taken it off except for bathing since that day so she always wore it as a connection to the Doctor. Actually, she hadn’t taken it off since the day the Doctor entrusted her with a key once more, something he had no obligation to do after her attempted blackmail. She’d been so grateful, she’d hugged the Doctor tight for five minutes, leaving him nearly breathless … this was not long before he’d finally taken a liking to hugging again.

The last thing Clara did was to remove the rose over her ear; it had no place on Trap Street.

She took one last look around what had been her home for fifty years. Her treasured library of first edition classics. The classic white console room. And the diner itself that held so many memories, both good and sad. Joyful celebrations of an adventure well done, vicious arguments, gentle evenings listening to music, sad nights staring at photos of the Doctor and Clara in happier times.

“Clara,” Ashildr said, “you still have close to three days left before the deadline. You don’t need to go now.”

“I thought about this, and, seriously, how good would those last hours be? Me staring at the clock, worrying about the raven, how it will feel. What death might be like? Knowing the Doctor will put himself through hell for me. You may as well put me in a torture chamber, Ashildr.”

The two women were escorted to the extraction chamber. Clara kept getting flashes of memory from the moments after she’d been rescued, and it felt as if the ringing in her ears that had initially been caused by her lack of heartbeat was back in full force. 

The room was stark and white, not dissimilar to the interior of a virgin TARDIS. At the end, a small door — too proportionately small for the room, really — sat closed, a diffused blue light surrounding it.

The General nodded to one of the technicians, who pressed some buttons before the door opened. Beyond the door, Clara could see a nineteenth century-style food stall, though the colours were wrong, almost like an old 1970s projection set her nan used to have.

“What do I do?” Clara asked no one in particular.

The General stepped forward. “You will see a faint outline where you were standing. Once you assume a position approximating what you see, we will do the rest, time will heal and it will be done. Don’t worry about getting it exact; time will make the adjustments.”

Clara turned to see Ashildr weeping. Ashildr had made it clear that Clara was to not worry about her, just “take care of business.” Ashildr was an immortal on her second go-around through the universe. She’d lost people before. She’d be fine.

But still, Ashildr was weeping. Clara embraced the small woman and the two held each other tight. “I love you, my friend,” Ashildr said.

Clara kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Just remember me from time to time. And if you ever see the Doctor again … tell him I said Hi.”

Ashildr smiled and nodded. 

With a final nod to the General and Ohila, Clara approached the threshold. “Let me brave,” she muttered to herself. She stepped forward…

… And found herself flying backwards, landing in an untidy pile on top of two Time Lord technicians. She felt a twinge in her shoulder from where it struck a piece of equipment. 

“What the hell?” Clara’s eyes were wide as she scrambled to her feet. “Am I too late?”

The General wheeled on one of the technicians who hadn’t been knocked arse over teakettle. “Explain. Why didn’t she go through the portal?”

A nervous-faced man made some quick adjustments and read some reading on the screen. Clara was always good at reading people’s faces. On a scale between 1 (“Everything is just peachy, and oh yeah you just won a lottery and a date with David Beckham”) and 10 (“You’ll die a horrible painful death with blood streaming out your eyeballs”) this looked to be about 12.

“General,” the man said. “He needs to be here. There is a lockout. I warned you that this was a possibility. He needs to be here for this to work.”

Oh no, Clara thought. She knew exactly who they were talking about. _No, no, no!_

The General didn’t look very happy about it, either. “We need to find the Doctor and bring him here, fast. Can we send him a message?”

“It won’t be that easy,” Clara said.

“Explain.”

And so she did. There was no reason for the General and the Time Lords to have known that the neuroblock was used by the Doctor on himself. 

The General looked like she was getting a headache. She turned to the technician. “Prepare a reverse-neuroblock, and quickly. We need to get it to him so that his memories can be restored.”

“Why do we need to do that?” asked Ashildr.

“Because the status of the extraction chamber has to be exactly the way it was when Ms. Oswald was taken from her timestream. The Doctor needs to be here, because he was here. Remember, extraction was only ever intended to be a brief event.” The General suddenly looked sympathetic. “And there is one more thing — if the Doctor has completely or nearly completely forgotten Ms. Oswald, it won’t work, either. He literally needs to be the way he was.”

Clara clasped her hands and had to fight from wringing them. “In other words, you’re telling me…”

Ohila put her hand on the young(ish) woman’s shoulder. “You have to find the Doctor and make him fall in love with you again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fans of Jenna Coleman will probably catch the sly reference to the actress. But did you catch my reference to Peter Capaldi's past life as a musician?


	3. The Memory

The Doctor stared at his drink and wished he no longer had taste buds. He’d asked for coffee and had been served … something else. Or maybe this was what passed for coffee on the planet he’d already forgotten the name of.

Unfortunately, one thing he did remember is that on this world it was a criminal offence not to clean one’s plate or drain one’s cup or glass when offered, so the Doctor mentally held his nose and tried to imagine a strong Turkish coffee as he swigged down the molasses-like dregs.

“Am I expected to lick it clean, too,” he asked with his thick Scottish brogue. The waiter ignored him and instead just took the cup, inspected it to make sure all the liquid had been drained, and then moved on. It was also an offense to ask for seconds here — something to do with finite resources — and the Doctor silently praised whoever had come up with the idea. As it was, he was already hoping for a Dalek battlefleet appearing in the sky to help him forget he’d ever drank that.

Anyway, he had a job to do. He left his table (thankful that all food and drink on this planet was complimentary because he’d never have willingly paid for that swill) and headed out into the drizzle, swinging open a colourful umbrella with a question mark handle. His tall, lean form, topped by unruly grey-black hair and thick, imposing eyebrows, was garbed in a striking purple velvet dinner jacket and black trousers. He soon got the distinct impression that umbrellas were not in vogue on this planet, or perhaps no one had thought of inventing them, given the envious looks he got. That or they really liked his velvety coat.

As jobs go, it was a simple one; deliver an artifact to the head prefect of the town. Of course it was a trap. For one thing, said artifact – a simple grey cylinder – and the instructions for delivery had suddenly materialized on board the TARDIS. Such things were usually a clue to ill intent. And the Doctor was no one’s errand boy. He’d already had his fill of being one with that whole House of Winter nonsense that he’d gone through.

But it was a mystery, and if there was anything the Doctor couldn’t resist, it was a mystery. Which often led him into trouble, and sometimes hurt the ones close to him. It was an irresistible mystery that had led him to a hidden alien street in London where he lost someone very dear to him, someone he now knew he loved just as much as River, Rose and a select few others. But her death had led him down a dark path, and as penance he had lost most of his memories of her. Not everything: he remembered the broad details of all of the adventures they went on together, for example, and while all records of her had been suspiciously deleted from the TARDIS databank, he was able to piece together a lot of things just by using Earth’s Internet, including her name, Clara Oswald, and he’d pulled in a marker with Osgood of UNIT and his former companion Jack Harkness of Torchwood to find out other details, though the two were admittedly guarded about what information they were willing to provide.

There were other things, too. Reminders. A bizarre T-shirt he’d found in an otherwise empty closet. How he’d occasionally catch a whiff of a familiar perfume when he’d pass a corridor. A copy of _Pride and Prejudice_ he’d had for centuries that suddenly was now inscribed “To CO from JA. You naughty girl!”

But there were things about Clara that were definitely wiped or that he had trouble retaining, like the sound of her voice, her smile, her personality … such things that might make someone fall in love with a person, he mused. Even though he remembered meeting this Clara person afterwards, later confirmed when he saw a beautiful portrait of her painted on the side of his TARDIS, those memories faded very soon after they’d parted and he’d even forgotten her name until he ran into Courtney Woods, one of Clara’s pupils, during a visit to London and she’d given him a big hug of condolence. 

There was also a mysterious message written on one of his TARDIS blackboards, “Run you clever boy, and be a Doctor.” He knew it was a private message between Clara and himself — he was not too sure regarding what but he’d narrowed it down to a few incidents such as a visit to the Dalek asylum, something involving evil snowmen and the Great Intelligence and the Paternoster Gang back in the 1890s, or perhaps it was related to Trenzalore when someone had prevented the Great Intelligence from destroying his timestream. He confirmed Clara was involved in that last when Vastra corrected him one afternoon that, no, it wasn’t her wife, Jenny, who had splintered herself though the Doctor’s timestream. That had been Clara Oswald. 

Not for the first time, the Doctor wondered what Ms. Oswald was up to and if she was well. He may not have the memory of being in love with her anymore, or much else, but she had been his companion, and only a select few individuals hold that honour. On that merit alone, he hoped that, wherever she was, she was being amazing.

***

Twelve hours later, the Doctor could be heard repeating to himself, “I told me so, I told me so, I told me so,” as he high-tailed it from the prefect’s prison. It had been a trap alright, and a doozy, too. Something about a big reward being offered for the Doctor’s head because of some incident he'd long forgotten involving Abslom Daak. To be honest, the Doctor had found it so boring he deleted it from his memory almost as soon as the charges were read. As traps went, this was kind of dull.

He did pay attention to the “firing squad at dawn” part, though, so at about an hour to dawn he exercised his cunning wiles and supreme skill … and opened the unlocked cell and walked out. Humanoid brains could be hilarious at times, the Doctor chuckled to himself, though if he’d known his intense eyebrows, piercing stare, and an accent that to these people was the equivalent of Ricardo Montalban at his most romantic would have had that effect on the burly guard who’d hadn’t the heart to see his “lovely head blown off,” as the big fellow had so romantically put it, he might have used those charms much earlier. It might have made that incident with Robin Hood go a lot smoother and he wouldn’t have looked the fool in front of what’s-er-name … Clara. Clara, that was her name.

The Doctor kept running into the forest surrounding the town, the guards no more than thirty yards behind him. Just a little further and he’d have the corner of a building between him and their guns. 

For the third time in so many minutes the Doctor marvelled that this civilization had mastered the art of projectile weaponry, interdimensional communications and transmatting, yet hadn’t gotten around to inventing the bloody umbrella.

And if only he didn’t have the James Bond Theme running through his head in an endless loop. The last time he’d had an earworm like that he’d … done something. A clockwork squirrel flashed in his mind, but he didn’t have one anymore. He had one, he was certain of it, but it had been stolen. 

A rifle cracked behind him and he pivoted on his right leg around a tree and straight into something soft and petite that yelped slightly. A young woman suddenly was sprawled in the ground in front of him. He could barely make her out in the dimness, but he could tell her eyes were large, beautiful and staring at him in the near-darkness. He had a momentary flashback to a pair of large, beautiful eyes staring at him on Gallifrey.

“I beg your pardon, are you hurt?” Ever the gentlemen, even with the enemy in hot pursuit. He reached down to help her up.

Clara tried to keep her cool. Tried to stop herself from jumping into his arms. Remember, he doesn’t remember you, she thought.

“It depends on your definition of pain, Doctor,” she said as she got up.

The Doctor looked into big brown eyes that looked strangely familiar. It was still too damn dark to make out her face clearly.

“Do I know you?”

“Intros later. Running now,” Clara said, grabbing the Doctor’s hand. 

The Doctor was rather impressed that this young woman, nearly a foot shorter than he, was able to keep up with his long strides. In fact, she was almost dragging him along and strangely didn’t even appear to get winded, even though they ran for a good five minutes at full gallop and it was he who was starting to feel a bit out of breath. And it was still too dark to get a good look at her.

Suddenly a row of rifles appeared right in front of them, blocking the trail once it had widened into a clearing. Several of the men aimed torches at the couple.

“Uh-oh,” said Clara. In the unfiltered torchlight, the Doctor saw her more clearly now and he immediately forgot about the row of guns. 

“You!” he breathed. It was the girl from the diner. It was Clara. He looked at her in a manner not unlike a little kid coming across a new shiny thing. The Doctor honestly had no idea what he was feeling at that moment. He reached out tentatively and touched her forearm.

Clara gave him a quick smile and jerked her head to the left. “Uh, Doctor, the guns?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” He fingered his sonic screwdriver and a piercing soundwave cut through the air in front of them, mowing down the soldiers.

“They’re not?”

“Nah, they’ll just wake up in a few minutes with a hell of a headache!”

“Why didn’t you just do that back there?”

“I needed the exercise. What are you doing here? No, file that question for later. To the TARDIS, quickly!”

He made off in the direction of his TARDIS, but Clara grabbed his arm and stopped him.

“Doctor, I think I’d rather take you to my place.”

“I’m not that type of guy.”

Clara flushed. Back when the Doctor had his fez and bow-tie fetish that type of joke was par for the course. But she never knew this Doctor to make those kinds of jokes. Frankly, the Doctor was kind of curious where that had come from himself. “No, silly, you know what I mean. To my TARDIS. I need to speak to you about something important.”

“Lead on, then.”

They followed a narrow path through the trees towards one that seemed a little out of place. 

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Clara asked. “I’ve been waiting decades to phone you and you didn’t answer.”

“Sorry, they make you turn your phones to silent when they, I don’t know, lock you up in a dungeon and you’re forced to flirt with a Brian Blessed lookalike to be let free.”

“Not your type, then?” Clara teased.

With only about thirty yards to go a shot rang out from the distance behind them. Almost instantly the Doctor’s sensitive hearing picked up a sound like a pebble hitting wet sand and Clara grunted, arched her back, spun and fell to the ground, unmoving.

“Clara!” The Doctor dived on top of her to protect her from any more bullets. He aimed his sonic behind him and activated a rarely used cutter setting to cause about a dozen trees to fall in on themselves, creating a giant fence between them and the shooter. It would buy them time at least.

The Doctor turned Clara over onto her side to see her grimacing.

“Why, Doctor, is that a sonic in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“Why can’t it be both?” The Doctor looked slightly puzzled.

She giggled, which struck the Doctor as odd for someone who’d just been shot in the back. “Help a lady up, would you?”

Puzzled, the Doctor stood up and took Clara’s proffered hand. She hauled herself to her feet, looking none the worse for wear. The Doctor checked her back where the bullet had hit. The cloth of her shirt was torn, a small hole, and there was also a small hole in her skin.

“The universe still needs me to die, Doctor. But it needs me to die on that trap street in London in the 2010s. Not here. Not yet.”

“It never occurred to me that this might happen.”

“Well, it also might not have occurred to you that the guy with the gun is running this way, and I really am not in the mood to carry your regenerating carcass. Run!”

The two scrambled towards the out-of place tree. It was Clara’s TARDIS, this time a burned out log lying on its side. She and the Doctor had to get on their knees to open the door. “Now you know why I prefer the police box,” the Doctor quipped. Clara didn’t argue; in fact her ship’s chameleon circuit had done even worse things since it had been repaired. She still remembered the time it decided to take the shape of a thirty-storey-tall construction crane. As a non-breathing immortal, Clara didn’t mind the twenty-minute ladder climbs to get to and from the entrance, but Ashildr was less than thrilled considering that, after trillions of years of life, she choose the first descent to discover her fear of heights, married with vertigo. Clara had to sedate her and carry her over her shoulder when they went back up. Ashildr was convinced their TARDIS did that on purpose.

Inside the TARDIS, the diner façade was just as the Doctor had experienced it. One big difference was the windows were now dark (a holographic projection gave the illusion of a starry desert evening beyond), which made the neon glow of the lights and the jukebox even more dazzling.

The door snapped shut just as the crack of a rifle sounded. The guy was welcome to take pot shots at a virtually indestructible tree stump all he liked now.

“I think I remember this place,” the Doctor said, a bit uncertain as he looked around, his eyes focusing on the counter where he and Clara had shared a final lemonade.

“Glad to see you remember some things,” Clara said, a bit less kindly than she’d intended.

“That was you, wasn’t it? It was your diner that Amy and Rory and River and I went to in Utah back in 2011. I never got to ask before.”

Clara laughed. “Guilty, your honour. When you said the diner looked familiar I remembered the story you’d told me about how you married River and I did a little digging and managed to find the time and place you were at … and I realized it was our TARDIS. So I parked it, set things up to make it a real diner and even hired a few staff because you weren’t supposed to have met me yet, though I was always only a few feet away, watching. And then you — or one of you, anyway — just had to be a smart ass and park your TARDIS inside one of the fake storerooms ... 

“Oooh … bad, bad idea,” the Doctor murmured.

“You think? Luckily, Ashildr had memorized the manual by then and knew a couple settings to avoid a time ram. The biggest trick was that you had to choose smack dab in the middle of that whole Miracle Day thing to have your reunion. You did realize that Amy and Rory were technically immortal at the time, right?”

“I don’t like to talk about that.” The Doctor’s expression was such that Clara decided to drop it. She’d lived through Miracle Day, too, of course, back when she was alive. Fortunately she’d managed to avoid any accidents, and like so many others she’d bought into the lie that the whole thing was some sort of terrorism incident involving drugged water supply, just like the mass hallucination of a few years earlier where it seemed the Earth had been relocated. Little did she know she was getting a preview of her life to come. A couple hours in the Black Archive had been an eye-opener.

Clara motioned the Doctor to the counter. He took the same chair next to the retro transistor radio on which he’d played “her song” so long ago. Clara could still remember him looking like the ultimate rock star, sitting there playing his guitar. She wondered if he still had it. 

Ashildr entered the diner through the Elvis door and stood by the counter, a dubious expression on her face. To her surprise, the Doctor actually looked at her with fondness.

“Hello, Me.”

“Hello, Doctor. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I really wish you weren’t here right now.” She took a look at Clara, who had momentarily turned away to get herself one of her prescribed glasses of water and frowned as she looked at Clara’s back. “Not again!” she said. “Do you have any shirts without bullet holes in them, Clara?”

“One last one for the road,” Clara said as she handed a glass of water to the Doctor, though she was also talking to Ashildr. She took the next few moments to empty her own glass in several large gulps. She could feel the cool liquid go down her esophagus and into her abdomen. From there it would be absorbed, though probably not completely in the time she had left. The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

“Side-effect of being a nearly dead and having limited circulation. I have to drink about five of these a day otherwise I start drying up. And you don’t want to see me when I resemble something out of _Dawn of the Dead_. I have a youthful complexion to maintain, after all.”

The Doctor smiled and took a sip of the water. “So, exactly why am I here? I mean, I’m grateful for the help out there. Wish I could say it felt like old times, but I’ll have to trust that it did?”

Clara smiled. “God, yeah. Ashildr?” She nodded towards the exit into the console room. Ashildr nodded and after giving Clara an unhappy look that was rebutted with an I-know-what-I’m-doing stare, left the two alone in the diner. The Doctor followed her with his eyes as she went through the door and could see the control room beyond.

“How did you find me, by the way?” the Doctor asked.

“Gallifrey may be back in our dimension now, but that doesn’t mean there are TARDISes all over the place. It’s all wibbly-wobbley,” Clara smiled slyly at the Doctor; his current version hated that phrase, “but basically as far as my TARDIS is concerned right now there are only two of them currently active outside Gallifrey, mine and yours, so it was easy to home in on yours.”

“I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Neither did I, otherwise, we might have …” Clara didn’t let that thought complete itself. Instead, she motioned the Doctor to a booth and they sat close and Clara took one of the Doctor’s hands in hers.

“How much do you actually remember about us,” Clara asked. “You seemed to remember just about everything up to the point where you passed out. When I met you here, my name and face were gone, but you knew why you erased your memory and lots of other stuff. It wasn’t like you had full-out amnesia.”

“The neuroblock mustn’t have done its work completely. By rights it should have erased every last detail of you. I’d have lost many years of my life but I have plenty to spare and I probably would have just assumed I’d regenerated around the time Amy and Rory left me and picked up the pieces from there.”

Clara was thankful that it hadn’t happened because one of their adventures saw the Doctor finally resolve his guilt over the end of the Time War — and take a third option, saving billions of lives. To lose that knowledge would have been a tragedy.

“I do still remember bits and pieces,” the Doctor said. “I know we were in a Dalek Asylum together, and on a cloud in Victorian London…” Clara frowned a little; those were her echoes … “…and you and several earlier mes helped to end the Time War and save Gallifrey. But I’ve lost some details.”

“You erased me to protect the universe.” And because you loved me, Clara added in her head; a dangerous turn of phrase she’d best avoid for the moment. “We formed what was called the Hybrid. Together we threatened all of time and space. You tried to erase my memory but I switched the neuroblock’s polarity and you ended up doing it to yourself.”

“This I remember. And I remember that I knew all along it would be me.”

“What?”

“You really are a genius. You reversed the polarity. With a pair of cobbled-together sonic glasses I put together one night when I was bored. I knew it the moment I examined the device. There was never any risk to you.”

“And yet you let it happen to you.”

“It was the only way. And I’d hurt you. I’d broken the promise I’d made when I chose the name The Doctor. I endangered everyone because of my greed. I was cruel, I was cowardly, and I had to make amends somehow. And I couldn’t tell you I knew because it was right — I had to do it, for both our sakes.”

“But you lost what I told you in the Cloisters.”

The Doctor looked deep into Clara’s eyes. How could he have forgotten how beautiful they were? Flashes of memory: those incredible eyes glistening with tears after Ohila told her how long he’d been in the confession dial (was it really four and a half billion years?), her soft grip on his arm as she made him listen to something very important … but, dammit, he couldn’t call it up. 

“I’m sorry, Clara. It’s still gone.” Clara looked downcast. “I know it must have meant something, though.”

“How?”

“I have a vague memory of crying after I went through the hatch. Very unbecoming of ‘The Oncoming Storm.’ Remember, I said how I used that TARDIS to back up in time a bit? Well, it took me a little bit to collect myself. So whatever you told me, it was a whopper. I assume you weren’t confessing to stealing my clockwork squirrel.”

“How did you know…?” Clara’s eyes widened. She’d taken it when she’d gone to retrieve her stuff from his TARDIS. She loved that squirrel and it gave her memories of that visit to the underwater base where she’d once again more or less told the Doctor she loved him. 

Seeing the Doctor’s amused expression, Clara sputtered. “Oh, no, no — that’s’ not what I told you down there!” She laughed. “Wouldn’t that have been something? ‘People like me and you, we should say things to one another … I stole your clockwork squirrel!’”

For a few moments, it was as if they were back together again, leaning against each other in helpless laughter. And then the laughter died away as the Doctor suddenly hugged Clara close.

“You never used to be the hugging type, Doctor.” God, it felt good to be wrapped in his arms, though Clara was doing her own fair share of squeezing.

“I guess it’s one of the many things you taught me that made it through the neuroblock. I haven’t done this in a long time.”

They broke away. The Doctor frowned. “Clara, tell me why we’re together again. This isn’t random. And Ashildr seems pretty upset that I’m here at all.”

Clara took a deep breath. She didn’t need it but for some reason the sensation of air entering her lungs — something she never became aware of until after she “died” — relaxed her. 

And then she told the Doctor about Missy’s phone call. She wasn’t ready to tell him the rest. The Doctor sat in silence.

“Part of me is ready to return to Trap Street,” she said. “A big part of me just isn’t ready yet.”

“How long has it been for you since we were last together?” the Doctor asked.

“For me, about fifty years.”

The Doctor stroked Clara’s face. “For me, it’s been about fifty years, as well.”

“That all?” Clara laughed. “So I’m about eighty-something years old now, you’re probably about 2,050, give or take a few billion…” the Doctor’s eyes hardened a little. Oops, best leave that be, Clara thought. “Damn, people are still going to think you’re too old for me.”

“Ageists,” the Doctor sighed. “I could have just as easily regenerate as a toddler and I’d still be the oldest person on the planet.”

“Baby Doctor,” Clara mused. “You would have needed someone to mother you.”

“I know someone who had pretty good qualifications as a nanny.”

“Hey, you’re remembering more of me.”

“I only forgot your face and personality, remember. I never forgot that you were a teacher and a nanny and an entertainment director on the _Starship Alaska_.”

Clara shook her head with a smile.

“That wasn’t you?”

“Not that last one,” said Clara. “You’re thinking about one of the other mes. I pay tribute to them in my own way.” She gestured to the rose over her ear, which she had replaced as she left Gallifrey. “Oswin Oswald — of the _Starship Alaska_ — used to wear one of these.”

“You met her? I don’t remember very much about her because all I heard was her voice and your voice was erased.”

“Yeah. I tried tracking down some of my echoes, maybe thought I could save one or two. But it was too difficult. We found out with Winnie Clarence — you probably don’t remember her — that they don’t all die.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“The next time you meet Elizabeth II or Liz 10, by the way, tell them Victoria says hello.”

“Excuse me?”

“You met Victoria when she was old and grey and just before she started Torchwood.”

“I remember that. I was with Rose and it had something to do with werewolves. What did that have to do with you?”

“You never looked at Victoria closely, did you.”

Clara could tell the Doctor was going through his mental photo album, calling up every image he could imagine, along with his memories of that bizarre few days in Scotland back during his tenth life. Evidently, he must have found what he was looking for as the Doctor suddenly seemed to be staring through Clara at some detail only he was privy to. Likely because he had no inkling, it was a memory that survived the neuroblock.

“You have to be joking,” he said as his eyes refocused on Clara.

“I’m not! Queen Victoria was one of me, Doctor.”

There was nothing else the Doctor could say to that. He’d been friends — and foes — with the British Royal Family for a long time. He didn’t know how he’d react the next time his path crossed with that of Victoria, especially in her younger days. And the fact Victoria went on to create Torchwood and technically banished the Doctor from her kingdom … that hadn’t been very Clara-like. Whatever Clara-like actually meant, he thought.

The Doctor could sense that Clara was trying to avoid the matter at hand. “Clara, I know you need me to get my memories back, but I just don’t have the means to undo the neuroblock...”

In her pocket, Clara held a small grey device roughly the size of a mobile phone. She pulled it out of her pocket. The Doctor glared at it. “... and that’s a neuroblock device,” he finished.

“Yes, Doctor. And it’s been set to restore your memories.”

“Clara, I know I’ve forgotten a lot, but there was a very good reason why we pressed that button together. If you restore my memories god knows what I might do for fear of losing you again. I’ve always tried to keep my distance from the people I travel with. They are my friends, but I can’t allow myself to get too close like I did with Rose, and with you.” 

The Doctor citing Rose didn’t offend Clara; there had been few secrets between them and she knew that an earlier Doctor — two, in fact — had been in love with the young shopgirl from London. And losing her had torn him apart nearly as badly as losing Clara. 

She frowned. “Aren’t you forgetting River? You married her, after all.”

“River and I had a very special relationship, and yes I married her, but I never truly gave my hearts to her because I knew what was going to happen to her in the Library. I regret that. I never realized how much it hurt her. But I’m not going to lie to you. My feelings for you ran deeper. And I’m afraid, Clara. If you push that button I might lose control again. I might hurt you worse than I did before.”

“I have good reason,” Clara said. And then finally she told him about how the extraction chamber required the Doctor — with all of his memories and feelings intact — in order to save the universe.

The Doctor sat in stunned silence. “My god,” he said quietly. “How long do you have?”

“Not long. A couple of days. The moment my heart starts beating again, if I’m not standing in front of the raven, everything ends.”

“Because of me.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t I? I’m a Time Lord. I’m supposed to know everything.”

Clara smiled. “Please, Doctor. I need you, the old you, back. I know it’s going to hurt and you might become angry or sad … but the universe needs the Doctor, all of him. I need the Doctor, all of him. I want you. All of you.”

The Doctor slipped his hand into Clara’s and took the device from her. Without hesitation, and without breaking eye contact, he pressed the button. 

Just like before, nothing seemed to happen at first. And for a moment Clara was fearful that the Doctor might pass out again — he was out cold for nearly twelve hours last time and that was time she could not afford to lose now.

She kept her focus on the Doctor’s eyes, almost willing him to stay with her as a moment of uncertainty flashed across his face and his smile weakened into a frown. His eyes began to cross.

“Oh, no you don’t. You stay with me, don’t you dare pass out on me!”

The Doctor started to shiver and instinctively pulled Clara close to him, almost as if he needed her warmth. Clara surrendered herself to the hug and was immediately grateful she no longer needed to breathe otherwise she would have had the air squeezed out of her.

The Doctor groaned quietly. Oh god, please don’t let that be pain, Clara thought. Not that.

And then the shivering subsided and the next thing she knew she felt … sniffing? The Doctor was sniffing her hair. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

“I really missed that,” the Doctor said, his voice different now, deeper in a way. “Breathing you in.”

He released his vice-like grip on Clara and pulled back. It was the same Doctor that she’d been talking to a minute ago, but now … he looked at her in a way she hadn’t seen in many, many years. And she couldn’t help but smile back.

“Hello, stranger,” she said. And, just like that, her palm was against his cheek, stroking his cool skin. And his right hand was taking her hand and he was kissing it, much like he did back on Trap Street. But this time there was no sorrow in his eyes (a look Clara wished many times she’d wiped from her memory), but pure joy. Like when he thought he’d discovered ghosts under the lake in Scotland, or when he realized he could save Gallifrey, or when Clara had agreed to travel with him again after the _Orient Express_. 

“My Clara,” he said.

***

From the console room, Ashildr watched through a monitor as Clara made the biggest mistake of her extended life. The fact the Doctor needed to get his memory restored was not up for debate, but they should have done it in controlled conditions, she thought. With armed guards covering both of them.

“Please, be careful,” she said to herself. 

***

The Doctor took a big swig of water. Apparently getting one’s memory restored causes intense thirst.

“Ahh, that’s good. Sorry, Clara.”

Clara laughed, “Don’t worry, Doctor. I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time. You’ve really got your mojo back, haven’t you?”

The Doctor started at the phrase. “An odd word coming from you. You been spending time hanging out with Austin Powers since I’ve been away?”

“No, my gran used to use it when I was a kid. She said if I wasn’t careful, some day I’d lose my mojo. When I was a little kid, I lost my favourite pencil, my gran and my mojo and … and ...”

Clara’s eyes were so wide they nearly bugged out. They got that way because she saw the Doctor doing the same. 

“It was **you**!” they both said in unison.

A swing set in a playground in the mid-1990s. A little girl with beautiful big eyes striking up a conversation with a sad-looking young man in a bow-tie who’d lost a friend and was looking for her. And talking about destiny. 

The Doctor swallowed hard. “I never realized that was you.”

“I never realized that was you, either, until just now. You’ve been with me since nearly the beginning?”

“Before, actually. I saw your parents meet.”

Clara’s jaw dropped. “And you never thought to tell me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“That’s OK. Remember that bootstrap paradox thing back at the lake?” It felt good to see the Doctor nod and remember. “I never told you where we went after we rescued Orson Pink from the end of the universe. I took us to Gallifrey, Doctor.”

“You what? How was that even possible?”

“I’ve given that a lot of thought. Best thing I can figure is Gallifrey came out of the pocket universe a lot sooner than we thought. But that’s not all, Doctor. I saw the barn. I saw you. And I … spoke to you.”

The light of realization began to dawn on the Doctor’s face. “Fear is a superpower.” “Fear shouldn’t make you cruel or cowardly.” “Fear makes companions of us all.” All this came from Clara, after she had heard the Doctor say them.

The Doctor chuckled. “Who composed Beethoven’s Fifth?”

“Mistress of the Bootstrap Paradox, that’s me. What happened to the toy soldier I gave you, by the way?”

“Stolen by one of the other kids while I was asleep. Sorry. So, I take it you eventually found somebody … a relative of Danny, maybe?” Orson Pink had to come from somewhere was the unfinished part of the question.

“What? No, I …” Clara stammered for a moment, but chose not to tell the Doctor that intimacy was no longer possible with her … much less having children, obviously. But she did tell the Doctor about Winnie. The Doctor reacted the same way she did when she found out — utter relief that Danny’s death hadn’t erased brave Orson from history.

“So how were those fifty years, Clara Oswald?” the Doctor asked.

“I finally got around to learning to fly a plane,” Clara said with an impression of an old lady’s voice. A private in-joke of a shared dream. “I’ve seen wondrous things in the universe, saved entire galaxies, still can’t bake a damn soufflé to save my life, but I solved the JFK assassination which was something that had intrigued me since you and I went to Parkland Memorial Hospital the day after and got involved in that business with the Shroud. I tried to do you proud, Doctor.”

“You did. Once in a while I’d hear a story, or visit a place that sang of your legend. It felt good to know you were doing good out there, regardless of my lack of precise memories of you. When did you start calling yourself The Teacher, by the way? I thought cool occupation-based aliases were my thing.”

“Oh, that! It was a temporary thing, well for a few decades. When I first started I realized we had to stay apart, and I figured if you started hearing stories of someone named Clara Oswald raising havoc you might be inspired to investigate. Calling myself The Teacher … it was a good cover. But eventually I decided to just use my real name. Maybe I hoped you’d find me.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“Well you have now.”

“Were you lonely?”

“Ashildr has been a good friend. A very good friend. And we’ve travelled with a few people over the years. Men, women … some became a bit more than friends, even.”

The Doctor's eyes narrowed a fraction. Jealousy, Clara thought, just like she saw — but failed to truly recognize — back at Coal Hill the night he’d first met Danny. She didn’t know why she even said this to him; she may no longer be capable of certain intimacies, but she could still feel attraction, and man was she feeling it now. 

“But, Doctor, none of them were you. I was never lonely, but God how I’ve missed you. So much.”

They were so close now, Clara was all but sitting in the Doctor’s lap. For about a minute they just sat in silence, like two star-crossed lovers on a date, enjoying each other’s company. Clara almost wished she’d prepared a milkshake with two straws to complete the scene.

“What about you, Doctor? How were those fifty years? And please tell me you’re just in-between companions right now. If you swore off having friends travel with you I’ll be pissed.”

“Much of it was the same old, same old. I spent a number of years in one place, voluntarily this time, giving an old friend some company before I had to say goodbye. I stopped a few dozen wars. Had to put down another Zygon uprising on Earth, with Bonnie-slash-Osgood’s help this time. Had a run in with not just Missy but a handful of other Masters, too — at the same time. And, yes, I travelled with a few people who became very good friends — I even managed to convince Vastra, Jenny and Strax to join me for a while. But even though my memories were suppressed, it wasn’t the same.”

“Were you lonely?” Clara asked.

“Yes.”

There comes a moment where two people get into perfect synch, and both know what the other was thinking and almost like a magnet they join their lips. Even though the Doctor wasn’t really the kissing type in his current body, a fact he often regretted, he instinctively found himself leaning towards Clara. And Clara reached up and put her arms around his neck. Moment of truth, Clara thought.

And then Ashildr cleared her throat from the doorway.

“Sorry to break things up. But Gallifrey has sent us a message and they’re waiting for a reply.”

Ashildr tried to ignore the fact that the Doctor somehow managed to look even angrier than he did back on Trap Street. She knew she had just destroyed a moment the two probably had been waiting for for a long time. 

The Doctor got out of the booth, and he and Clara strode hand in hand towards the big door with the garish Elvis portrait that led to the control room. 

“You’ll thank me later, trust me,” Ashildr said in response to the angry pair of beautiful brown eyes that flashed at her as they went past. 

They opened a channel to Gallifrey and the General replied. Clara had to admit she was even more imposing as a dark-skinned clear-voiced woman than she’d been as an elderly, gravelly voiced man. But she was surprisingly sympathetic as she gave Clara a revised time frame for when they expected her heart to start beating again, and it wasn’t good news. 

Suddenly, the impossible girl, who had spent decades travelling the stars, found herself measuring her remaining life in a very few hours — no longer days — just like she’d done on Trap Street. It was happening too quickly. She wasn’t ready. Before, she was ready to get it over with. But not now. Not that she was finally with him again.

“What happened to three days? You promised me three days! Not three hours! Three days!”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Oswald. You have to return as soon as possible. If there was any other way…”

“We understand,” the Doctor interrupted as he realized Clara wasn’t going to be able to reply. “We will be with you shortly.”

“Not you, Doctor.” The General’s face turned to steel. “Ms. Oswald may come, and she may bring her companion the Lady Me with her. You may not accompany her.”

“Why the hell not?” Clara slammed her hands on the console. The Doctor got a flashback of her doing the same thing back on the underwater base when he told her he had to die. “You said he needed to be there with me! I crossed the universe to find him.”

“Our technicians figured out what you would call a work-around. They had to because thanks to the Doctor’s actions I am not the same person I was at that moment, either. And the paradox would have only been compounded if we’d brought my previous self forward. We had to solve the problem, and we have. I am happy that you were able to find the Doctor, and I hope you are able to say your farewells, but the Doctor stays where he is.”

“Screw. You,” Clara said. She rarely swore so crudely and Ashildr was grateful the General wasn’t there in person. Even the General seemed taken back. Ashildr put her arm around Clara, who was seething.

“Why can’t I come?” The Doctor asked.

“You know why, Doctor. We recognize now that the two of you form the Hybrid. We cannot trust the two of you being together on this planet. As it is you shouldn’t be together out there, either. Ms. Oswald, we’ve seen the lengths the Doctor would go to save you. He’s a living example of why we prohibit Time Lords from, to use your way of putting it, establishing relationships with other species. He can no longer be trusted as far as you’re concerned.”

“Then I’m not going, to hell with you and to hell with the universe,” Clara said.

“Clara, no,” Ashildr piped in.

“Ms. Oswald, you must. The universe depends on it.”

“The Doctor comes with me or else we’re going somewhere exotic to watch a sunset together until I feel my heart beat again and everyone else can go hang. I want him with me.”

“It’s OK, Clara,” the Doctor said softly, his hands on Clara’s shoulders. “I know their concerns are real. We’ll say goodbye here. A last dance, maybe? I always wanted to have a last dance with someone. There must be something nice on that old jukebox out there.”

Clara ignored him. “Please, General. You’re asking me to kill myself …”

“…Ms. Oswald, you are already de…”

“This is a dying woman’s last request. I want him to be with me at the end. He is the one person I want with me at the end. Please, I am begging you.”

The General muted the sound and they watched as she and Ohila debated. At times they appeared to be shouting, with Ohila gesturing directly at the time travellers and even somehow managing to make eye contact with Clara through the transmission. Then the General looked into the camera again, took a deep breath and unmuted the sound. “Very well, but the Doctor is to be guarded at all times and our guards will have orders to shoot to kill, not shoot to regenerate, if he attempts anything. We can’t take the risk.”

“I understand,” the Doctor said.

“Thank you,” Clara said softly.

“We will expect to see you soon,” the General said as the monitor returned to its screensaver mode of High Gallifreyan letters.

Clara slumped against the console, emotionally drained.

“Clara,” the Doctor said, the tone of his voice more one of disapproval than anything else. “What the hell are you playing at? Our relationship is not worth the lives of trillions of souls.”

She sniffed. “No, it’s not. I was bluffing. And it worked, right?” Clara looked upset that the Doctor would even question her motives. Not at this stage of the game.

“Two peas in a pod,” the Doctor smiled.

“I learned from the best. Which, granted, is what got me killed, but it worked this time. I want you there. Neither you nor anyone else gets a vote.” She smiled back.

Ashildr hid her own hurt at not being included when Clara said there was only one person she wanted with her at the end. After all, Clara had known her much longer than she ever had the Doctor, yet she always felt like a placeholder. But despite her finite memories, she remembered some things clearly and after watching their final moments together before the first memory wipe, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Hybrid forever. She should have had a pair of T-shirts made for the occasion. 

Slipping into practical mode, she asked instead, “How do you want to play this? We have two TARDISes. Do we leave one or do we take both?”

“Ashildr, I’ll let you pilot this one. I’ll travel with the Doctor in his. One last trip with the old girl, for old times’ sake, eh?” Clara smiled at the Doctor, who nodded. Ashildr frowned but nodded as well.

“So, ‘Dr. Disco,’ are you ready to brave the forces of evil one last time — or a few grumpy guys with guns — so we can get back to your ship?”

The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out his pocket. Clara whistled as she got her first proper look at it. The sonic shades were cool and all, but this was a _sonic_.

“Impressive. But it’s not the size that counts, of course…”

“…it’s what you do with it. Lead on, my lady.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd completely forgotten that not only did the Eleventh Doctor once meet Clara as a child in the prequel to "Bells of Saint John," he also more or less witnessed her parents' first meeting, which puts Clara's presence in the young Doctor's life in Listen and, for that matter, her echo's helping the First Doctor choose his TARDIS, into new perspective.


	4. The Interlude

The Doctor’s TARDIS was exactly as Clara remembered it, almost disturbingly so. Of course her memory was enhanced by her current status, but even so, you’d think something would have changed in fifty years. 

But the books were all in the same place, the silly Beethoven bust that looked like something she saw on _The Muppet Show_ was still lying next to some old vinyl on a chair. And the blackboard was still there. “Run you clever boy. And be a Doctor.” 

“Thank you for that, Clara,” the Doctor said. “I took strength from those words on many occasions, even if I couldn’t remember their exact origin.”

Clara smiled and ran her hands along the console. “I’ve missed you.”

“I know.”

“I was talking to her.”

“Ahhh,” the Doctor chuckled. “Shall I leave you two alone?”

Time was, the TARDIS hated Clara, but ever since the echoes the two had gotten along surprisingly well. Maybe she was grateful that one of the Claras had prodded the Doctor towards her back on Gallifrey. All Clara — today’s Clara — knew is when their minds had linked the day the Doctor asked her to pilot the TARDIS with her mind, in search of the origin of a nightmare, she had felt something touch her, if that made sense. The first time Danny distracted her and it never registered fully. The second time, when she accidentally piloted the ship to Gallifrey, it was as if the TARDIS was guiding her. The third time, when she arranged a mad scheme to undo a divergent timeline with the help of several of the Doctor’s past companions, and several Doctors, it had been even easier. She’d tried to link with her own TARDIS the same way, but it just never felt right. Her TARDIS did the job, but she always thought it was a stranger … or worse, little more than an automaton. The Doctor’s TARDIS, or “Sexy,” as she liked to be called, was special from Day One. A maverick. Clara could relate. Kindred spirits, the two of them.

“This is still the most beautiful ship in the universe,” Clara said. “And you’re the most beautiful captain.”

With that, she hugged the Doctor tight. The Doctor placed one arm about her and used his free one to punch in a few settings and flip the lever that set the TARDIS flying. Then he wrapped both arms around her.

“You did a pretty good job of erasing yourself from the TARDIS memory banks, by the way,” the Doctor said. “I take it you did that at the same time you left me the message.”

“Yeah, sorry. It was Ashildr’s idea and I went along with it. Thought it would make it easier for you, somehow. I cleared out my bedroom, and I even took the marking I’d left behind.”

“Ah, but you didn’t take everything, did you?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you found it, did you?”

“That ‘If lost, return to Clara’ T-shirt puzzled me for quite a while.”

It had been a mad idea. They’d been visiting Venice Beach when they came across a place promising “custom T-shirts while-u-wait” and while the Doctor was sent on an errand to buy hot dogs, she’d had that one made up for him, and an “I’m Clara” shirt made for her. Somehow she’d gotten the Doctor to throw his on over his old rocker shirt without reading it. It gave her a good laugh — and the Doctor, too. Though it had been a tad embarrassing when they’d forgotten to take them off and found themselves chasing down a rogue Graske and had to endure snickers from the L.A. branch of UNIT.

Clara smiled at the memory. There were so many. Good times, bad times. At times she found it hard to imagine that there was once a time when she was a twenty-four-year-old nanny who could barely even figure out what the Internet was and thought coffee was a food group.

“Doctor. Before we go to Gallifrey, I’d like to make a couple of quick stops on the way.”

“You know that the countdown refers to your body, not Gallifreyan time. We can’t stall it.”

“Yes, I know. I know I don’t have long, but I want to see a few places one last time.”

And so the Doctor took Clara to see one last time some of the places that had meant so much to her during their time together. The beautiful Rings of Akhaten. Victorian London. The _Orient Express_ in space (the Doctor had to keep his distance to avoid contaminating the timeline since he and Clara were aboard the train at the time). Coal Hill School. Her gran’s flat. The planet of the two-century-long New Year’s Eve party. The driveway outside what was once the Maitlands’ house. Brief stops; only five minutes or so each. The countdown stopped for nobody, not even time travellers.

And then, Clara had the Doctor take her to one more place.

With the exterior doors swung open and an oxygen bubble surrounding the TARDIS, Clara and the Doctor sat in the doorway, as they often did during their quiet times back in the old days, and looked down on the Earth. His favourite planet. Her home.

At her request, the Doctor had brought out his guitar. He hadn’t played it in many years. Hesitantly, but with increasing confidence, he began playing the romantic, loving melody he had subconsciously composed that had represented his lost memories of Clara, and what she had told him in the Cloisters. Now, with his memories restored, they both realized how perfectly that piece of music represented what she had said, and what the two of them had felt. 

“That was so beautiful,” Clara said when the Doctor finished. “What day is it?” she asked quietly, her head nuzzling the Doctor’s right shoulder as she looked down on the earth. 

“A very special day,” he said as he placed the guitar on the floor behind them. With both hands free he was able to hug Clara with his right arm and softly hold her hands with his left. "The most important day in the history of this world. Somewhere down in Blackpool, a little girl is being born to a young couple named Ellie and Dave. She’s destined to grow up to be the most impossible, wonderful, amazing girl. Someone who will make an impact on a Time Lord’s life beyond measure.”

Clara gazed into the Doctor’s eyes and this time, without anyone to interrupt them, she swung around until she was lying in his lap, looking at him, and their lips met for the first time. And then for a second time. And then for a third. 

“There are so many things I wish we could do,” the Doctor said, his lips resting on her brow for a moment. “I wish we could just keep running. I wish I could make your heart start beating again without blowing a hole in the universe. I wish… we’d realized a long time ago.”

“We both knew it, Doctor. We were just too scared to do anything about it.”

The Doctor laughed softly. “Ironic, isn’t it. You and me, we’ve faced down Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Zygons, Slitheen, Judoon, Sea Devils, Derren Brown … but expressing our feelings, now that’s what really made us run.”

Clara sighed pulled his face down towards hers and kissed him one more time before rolling on her side and looking out at the beautiful blue orb.

The Doctor started to speak and then stopped himself. When he tried again, he spoke in a tone Clara had never heard before.

“Clara, right now, at this place, at this moment, if I asked you … would you want to, you know…? With a daft old man like me?”

Clara looked up at him with a look that probably said it all but she spoke it aloud anyway. “You’re not an old man. You are the Doctor. And right now, at this place, at this moment, if you were to ask me … I don’t think I could say no.”

They held each other’s gaze. 

“Clara, do …” the Doctor began.

Clara silenced him with a kiss. “This is enough, Doctor. You, me, together. Just hold me for a little while longer. Everything is … so perfect…so…” 

And then it happened. On Trap Street everything had happened so quickly and Clara could only think about the Doctor — comforting him while talking him down from raining hell on Ashildr and everyone else. In the Cloisters she had wept for the sacrifice the Doctor had made and with the sudden realization of how much he truly loved her. And again, she had shed tears when she watched the Doctor’s memories slip away. She had screamed in sorrow afterwards, but it was mourning him, not herself; after all, she’d just been given a new lease on life. When she and Ashildr had returned to Gallifrey the day before, when everyone thought it would be the end, it was almost as if Clara was in denial about what was going to happen and there were no tears shed by her at all. Now, sitting in the doorway to the TARDIS, wrapped in the arms of the Time Lord she had loved — often privately — for so many years, staring down, godlike, at a planet she would never walk upon again, a final sunrise cresting the orb, for the first time Clara allowed herself to grieve … for herself. 

Not once had she ever cried for herself, but that time had come.

In waves, Clara broke down. The Doctor knew it had to come to this. His hearts broke deeply as Clara vented her anger and frustration. And all he could do was listen and hold her tight. 

It wasn’t fair, she cried out. She just wanted to help a friend. To help the Doctor. To do good. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to leave the Doctor. She wanted to live. Why did she have to die? It was just a simple, stupid mistake. Why? What was going to happen to her now? She was scared.

“I wish I knew, Clara,” the Doctor said as he stroked her hair. “It’s one mystery I’ve never truly solved.” He thought he had with Danny and the others in the Nethersphere; but in reality while Danny got to experience a few additional hours of consciousness, it was just Time Lord tech perverted by Missy. River’s consciousness was uploaded to the CAL computer but it was a mere simulacrum; even on Trenzalore the Doctor knew that he was speaking to a simulation of River and the real River died in that awful chair on the library planet. He himself “died” every time he regenerated, but it really wasn’t the same at all. Thank God he’d gotten it wrong at The Drum; the thought of Clara emerging as an eyeless ghost and terrifying people had horrified him when he’d stopped to think about it. “You’re going to be an explorer, Clara.”

“But I’ve heard so many people say that there is nothing after. That you just cease to exist.”

“But the fact is no one really knows, do they, Clara? People who think they’ve died and come back, were they really dead? Who is to know what becomes of us? The reason why there are so many different ideas about the afterlife is that people simply don’t know. Not even atheists and scientists know for certain. Best guesses — that’s all they can give us. Our souls, our essence, the energy that keeps us going … maybe we return to the stars, or maybe you get reborn as someone else, somewhere in the universe, or maybe you find yourself in a parallel universe — there are theories that...”

“But I won’t be with you.”

“Yes, you will. You will be here,” he gestured with his thumb and index finger at his two hearts. His voice caught on the last couple of words, and in that moment, he made a decision. But it would have to wait just a little while longer. 

Clara’s tears slowly stopped. The Doctor gave her a handkerchief to wipe her eyes with and she smiled back at him. “I’m sorry for putting you through all that,” she said.

“Never apologize for being human.”

It was Clara who decided the next move.

“We have to go back. I don’t know how much time I really have left and we can’t take the risk of my heart starting too early. There is too much at stake.” The Doctor helped her up. Clara hugged him, putting her head on his chest, calmer now. “Thank you for this, Doctor. For all of it. Thank you for just being here for me. For listening. And ...” she smiled up at him, “… thank you for asking.”

“Thank you for saying yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "question" scenario here was inspired by an episode of the old 1980s detective series Remington Steele. In the episode something traumatic happens to either Steele or Laura Holt (I forget which) but the scene ends with the two basically asking each other if they'd be willing to make love with the other, and they come to an agreement that yes they would ... but in the circumstances, they don't (and in fact I don't believe they actually do until the very end of the series). It was a very touching moment and I've tried to adapt it here. I'll let you judge whether successfully.
> 
> The T-shirt incident is based upon a popular piece of fan art that's been making the rounds. The "third occasion" in which Clara piloted the TARDIS with her mind references the Titan Comics miniseries Four Doctors. Derren Brown is invoked from the deleted scene from Face the Raven.
> 
> It took me ages to work out how Clara's breakdown would work. I think she needed one, because she's only human and she never really had a chance to react to her own demise in Face the Raven. She spent all her time worrying about the Doctor, grieving for the Doctor, and not for herself. She needed to do this now, in private, no Ashildr or Rigsy or whomever looking on. The Doctor, by contrast, had his breakdown in the confession dial. Though he didn't get get it all out of his system... The views expressed re: afterlife are what I think someone who has experienced the Netherphere, immortal people, and regeneration might think. There have been a couple of Torchwood episodes where it's suggested that death is just darkness, and I tried to make it a bit more hopeful than that for Clara.


	5. The Joining

The cacophony of wheezing and groaning probably would have been deafening if there was anyone around to hear it. But the General had ordered that the docking bay be left clear. No telling what state the Doctor and Clara might be in when they arrived. 

Which would have made the fact they emerged laughing and bantering with each other all the more puzzling if any Gallifreyans had been nearby to witness it.

The Doctor was nearly breathless with excitement as his story reached its climax. “And then before I knew it, my companion, Sonny, had pinned the pirate’s cloak to the wall and I was able to get back my sonic.”

“Sonny was a stuffed fish, Doctor! And he — it! Now you have me doing it! — _it_ was not your companion. _I_ was your companion! You just stole him from some shantytown tavern while I was scoping out that Hogwarts wannabe the Sea Devils took over.”

“Wasn’t that the time we shared a bath together?”

“No, you decided to park the TARDIS in the bathroom while I was taking a bath. And you had that damn fish with you then, too!” 

“Miss Oswald, a room where you keep giant ceramic bowls full of water was the perfect place for someone like Sonny.”

Clara, grateful for the bantering, pouted. “You never even offered to wash my back.”

That threw the Doctor of his stride and he blushed. (One point to Clara.)

“Sonny wouldn’t have approved,” he rambled. “He never had to be fed. He never played ambush hug. He never gave me puppy dog eyes while making me search out fictional characters for a hello. He was the perfect companion!”

“We are not amused,” Clara huffed with a Victorianesque regal air.

“You’re nuts,” the Doctor concluded.

“Fifty-seven varieties. Speaking of nuts, here comes the Welcome Wagon,” Clara said as Ohila and the General approached, surrounded by a phalanx of guards. Nah, she liked “gaggle” better, like a bunch of stiff-necked geese. Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny, he had said.

“Welcome back, Lord President,” the General said to the Doctor.

Clara looked confused. “Didn’t you kick him out and hire Donald Trump or something?”

Ohila piped up. “It might have been decades for you, but for us it’s only been a few months since you were here last, and Gallifreyan politics moves slowly. The last time the Doctor ran away from his duty it took a century before they got around to deposing him. So he’s still the boss. Sort of.”

“Does being Lord President come with a fancy plane? I like flying about in a big plane,” the Doctor said.

Clara laughed, “But you keep getting them blown up!” 

“Shush, you.”

It crossed Clara’s mind that there was no reason why should be able to banter so easily like this with the Doctor. Not now. Her life was nearly over. For all she knew only darkness lay ahead of her. But her breakdown had been cathartic. She had allowed herself, at long last, a chance to express her fear and her pain, to be selfish. Everyone needed to be selfish occasionally, and now … twenty minutes from now things might be different but she just treasured being with the Doctor again, one last time.

Ashildr had landed the other TARDIS by this point and walked across the bay to meet them. Clara felt a bit guilty that she’d made her friend fly solo that one last time, but thought it was for the best considering what she and the Doctor had just experienced together. None of that might have happened with an audience.

“General, so what happens next?” asked the Doctor.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Oswald, but we estimate no more than ninety minutes before your heart starts beating. We must move quickly. As before, please change back into the garments you wore at the time of your …” she aborted the rest of the sentence as a pointless reminder of what happened and what was yet to happen.

“I don’t want to leave you alone for a second,” the Doctor said to Clara. His grip on her hand was almost painful; a week before, she wouldn’t have felt a thing.

“Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”

***

Clara felt a strong sense of déjà vu as she and Ashildr returned to their TARDIS — soon to be the Time Lords’ TARDIS again as the high council had indicated it was to be confiscated once the Doctor was retrieved. Clara told Ashildr she had bequeathed her all her property, but Ashildr seemed to have made no attempt to pack up anything, not even her own stuff, which was puzzling but Ashildr didn’t seem to want to discuss it. Ashildr did accept one item that Clara asked her to give the Doctor … later.

She entered the wardrobe and began to change as Ashildr waited outside. Realizing this would probably be her final opportunity, Clara took a moment to examine her body in the mirror. The fresh bullet hole from a few hours earlier was still visible (she did have a healing factor not unlike Jack Harkness, but it was slow; a wound like this normally would take a week to heal; not enough time), and were some other scars she had picked up during her time with the Doctor. He never knew about the long, faded line on her side that she’d gotten during a swordfight when he was occupied with another part of a plan to save the world. She’d done worse to the other guy, though Clara took pride in the fact that, though all her adventures with the Doctor and Ashildr, she never really had to take that one step beyond (she was pretty certain she saw that one Sea Devil at Ravenscaur stirring after she'd dropped a chandelier on him). The enemy she had stabbed needed medical attention, some of which he received from Clara on the spot, and he might never have used that arm for swordfighting again due to the damage she’d done to it with her blade, but he lived and got to go home to his wife and kids, and he’d thanked her for that. Her life was ending with no real blood on her hands. For that she was grateful (especially to the Doctor who stopped her from ending Missy back in the graveyard). Ashildr could not claim the same in her long life and at times, Clara could tell, it haunted her. 

For a second, Clara mourned the fact she and the Doctor never got intimate enough for him to see that scar. Or the one on the small of her back she got when Missy pushed her down a twenty-foot pit on Skaro and she'd landed on a small rock. Or the faded burn mark on her shoulder blade that was a permanent reminder of the time she and the Doctor had shrunk down and had an adventure inside the workings of a Dalek. Danny had been the one to notice that one which she’d passed off as a childhood injury; perhaps it was for the best that the sword scar and most of the others came after she’d lost Danny. No awkward explanations required anymore, though she’d gotten some odd looks from her fellow teachers during that one staff spa retreat she’d gone on. 

Maybe if he hadn’t been so interested in that damn stuffed fish back at Ravenscaur School and had paid more attention to the fact there was a naked woman in the bath giving him a come-hither look (after the initial shock of the TARDIS suddenly appearing wore off, Clara realized that, swordfish or no, the Doctor had looked pretty damn attractive in his ersatz nautical disguise), he might have discovered a few things about Clara he didn’t know.

Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny, he had said. As memories go, that was a pretty funny one.

Less amusing was her realization that even if she weren’t a walking time bomb, if she and the Doctor were able to fly away somewhere like she’d wanted to, she’d have been unable to give herself to him. Not completely. And the fact she never had a child … it was never really a major goal in her life, something for “later,” but that didn’t stop her from being sad at the thought that there was no way she could have ever fulfilled that aspect of life, whether with Danny, because he left her before they had a chance, or even with the Doctor. She was grateful that this was never really the way she and the Doctor rolled anyway. The might-have-beens and the never-weres can drive a man insane, the song goes; the same applied to immortal women as well, so Clara pushed the thought from her mind, but not without a twinge as she realized she would probably never have a chance to revisit it. Not with only about seventy-five minutes left on the clock. There were a lot of things she was doing for the last time. At least she didn’t have to use the loo anymore. Marking that milestone would probably have just been silly. OK, that made her chuckle. Laugh at everything…

A few moments later, Clara emerged from her bedroom once again dressed in the simple grey and black outfit she had worn on Trap Street. Ashildr was leaning against a wall in the hallway, deep in thought.

“Ashildr, are you certain you won’t join us?”

“Clara, we’ve said our goodbyes. And I’ve learned from long experience that drawing them out does no good. You have been a good friend to me, but you and I both know that the person you want to me with before you leave us is the Doctor. And that’s how it should be.”

Clara and Ashildr embraced for the last time, and Ashildr surprised Clara by brushing her lips against hers as they broke apart. Their relationship had never really gone in that direction. Some things are simply left too late. They smiled at each other and Clara turned to follow the guard who had seemingly materialized behind her. No locked TARDISes on Gallifrey, it seemed.

Her last view of Ashildr was of the small, impossibly young-looking woman waving in farewell as they exited the TARDIS. Maybe it was symbolic, but the diner was no longer in place and they exited straight from the console room into the docking bay. Clara had a sudden craving for lemonade.

It amazed Clara how bright and detailed things were to her as she made her way to the extraction chamber. She began noticing every little detail, from the clouds in the sky glimpsed through a window, to a middle-aged looking fellow minding his own business at the far end of a corridor, pushing a broom. (All this technology at their disposal and they still used brooms to clean up. For just a moment, Clara had profound respect for the Gallifreyans.). She remembered a similar sensation when she left the Doctor on Trap Street and went to face the raven. One of her last thoughts — or what would have been her last thoughts, had the Doctor not intervened — had been of how beautiful everything looked. 

Before she arrived at the extraction chamber, Clara had to wipe tears from her eyes. She never could figure out why this one bodily function was still working. 

She entered the chamber. Even though she’d been here only a day or so before for the first aborted return to Trap Street, it felt different. Almost reverential. And, with the Doctor standing in the middle of the room, it didn’t feel as cold and impersonal.

There was an awkward silence as no one — not the Doctor, nor the gathered Time Lords and Sisterhood of Karn, nor Clara — really knew what to say next.

The Doctor finally spoke. “You look … fantastic.”

Clara laughed. “I thought you were going to say I look anemic or my face is too wide.”

“Now, why would I ever insult you?”

Clara chuckled. The Doctor really had changed since those early days. But then she never took his comments seriously back in the day. If it was possible to wink verbally, he seemed to always manage it, when he wasn’t being so cutely naive. She was still proud of the one time she shot back calling him a grey-haired stick insect. She liked that one so much that for a time she used an image of a stick insect on her mobile as the Doctor’s call icon. After she lost him, it was replaced by a photo she had taken of the two of them in a professional photo studio, Clara’s hand under his chin, pretending to help him smile, a loving smile on her face as she gazed at him. 

“Ms. Oswald,” the General stepped in, “I want you to know something. As I indicated earlier, we have been monitoring you for quite some time and I have to tell you, we were impressed with your work and that of Lady Me,” she said General. “If it were up to me I’d have let you continue indefinitely. In fact, if circumstances were different, we’d have even been happy to include you in our ranks.”

“What — me, a Time Lord?” Clara scoffed but felt honoured at the very notion. “Aren’t you supposed to have to be able to regenerate or have two hearts to be one?”

The Doctor smiled. “Actually, not always. Non-Gallifreyans have been trained as Time Lords from time to time. In fact a friend I used to travel with, Dorothy — she liked to be called Ace — she became one long ago.”

“I remember Ace,” the General chimed in. “She was a credit to the order. I know Lord President Romanadvoratrelundar spoke highly of her, as well.”

The Doctor knew Ace eventually returned to earth and devoted her life to charitable work. He recalled hearing from Kate Stewart that she’d even gone on an adventure with Sarah Jane Smith a few years earlier. He should say hello one of these days. He tried to ignore the reference to Romana. Not enough water under the bridge yet to forget what had happened to her. And how he’d been so blind back when they travelled together. It wasn’t until centuries later that he’d learned, quite by accident, how Romana had felt about him. But by then the Time War was raging and he never found out any more.

The Doctor realized that someone was absent.

“Where’s Ashildr?” he asked Clara.

“We’ve said our farewells. She wanted this to be just you and me. I hope you forgive her, Doctor. She really didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt — not even you — and I forgave her a long time ago.”

“I know.”

The General cleared her throat. “Ms. Oswald, there is someone who wants to say hello to you.”

Clara looked puzzled. The only persons on Gallifrey she knew, or cared to know, rather, were the Doctor and Ashildr.

A tiny, white-haired woman came out from behind the General walked towards Clara. Large, expressive brown eyes dominated her wizened features. For Clara it was almost like looking in a mirror, because the woman before her looked very much the way she had looked in her dream crab-induced state when she had thought she was in her nineties. 

“Young lady,” the older woman began, “my life will soon be over because I am of the worker class and I cannot regenerate. I wanted to meet you before I go, and I wanted to thank you for my life. My name is Claradvoratrelandin.”

Clara and the Doctor looked at each other with amazement. “You’re one of my echoes?”

Claradvoratrelandin smiled. “Who is to say you aren’t one of mine? Ms. Oswald, I know the story about how you entered the Doctor’s timestream to save him — and the universe — from the Great Intelligence. And I am proud to have been one of your ‘echoes,’ as you call them. I also know that many of your echoes did not survive. I wanted you to know that I did. I have had a long life, perhaps a little _too_ long, and while my connection with the Doctor was a brief one, the rest of my life was a good one. I wanted you to know.”

Clara hugged the old woman. “Thank you.”

“No, Ms. Oswald. Thank you. I’m well aware of what was at stake. Between you and me? When I heard the Doctor had extracted you and had fled in a TARDIS, I was rooting for you to make it.”

Clara laughed and looked at the Doctor.

The Doctor had been eying the woman over, and a memory finally presented itself from so song ago. “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the one who suggested I take another TARDIS than the one I’d originally planned to steal with Susan.”

Claradvoratrelandin smiled again. “The one and only. And I said you would have a lot more fun in the TARDIS I suggested. Was I right?”

“Oh, yes, did I ever.”

“Turns out the TARDIS you were going to take was sabotaged and it would have exploded the moment you dematerialized,” said Claradvoratrelandin. “I oversaw the retrofit of the ship, and removed the corruption, though I needn’t have rushed as it sat in the docking bay for millennia. I hope my TARDIS served you well … Clara Oswald.”

Clara didn’t know what to say. An echo had actually helped to save her, for once. Claradvoratrelandin nodded and hugged Clara one last time and then turned and gave the Doctor a hug before leaving the chamber. 

Clara turned to the Doctor and asked, “Did you know? Did you remember?”

“I never realized it was you, or rather her, back then because Susan and I were in a blind panic to get out of there. And it was so long ago. The barn, my TARDIS … I owe you so much.” 

The Doctor had made a decision back on the TARDIS and now it was time. He turned to the General but also addressed the technicians who had been politely standing off to the side. “Please, give us some time alone.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. Not after last time,” said one of the white-suited Time Lords. There were four in the room and, unlike last time, every single one of them carried a presidential-guard sidearm. No stun setting. Obviously useless for Clara, so the guns were meant for the Doctor, who had no idea whether his current regeneration was just a bonus or if he’d change. And even then, when he shot the General he intentionally aimed for parts of his/her body that would not cause instant death, allowing time for regeneration. No guarantee these guard wannabes would be so accurate.

Clara spoke up. “There won’t be a repeat of last time. Please, let us be alone. Just for a little bit. I give you my word nothing will happen. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

The Doctor hesitated.

“I said, isn’t that right Doctor? Please …” The Doctor nodded.

The General stared the Doctor down, but ultimately detected the plea in the elder Time Lord’s eye. “Do as she says.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Time Lord replied, and the Gallifreyans began to withdraw from the room.

“And I want the audio turned off. I am invoking presidential privilege,” said the Doctor, his voice deadly serious. 

Now Ohila’s voice came over the speaker from outside. “We cannot allow it, Doctor.”

“Ohila, I am about to tell Clara something no one else must be allowed to hear. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

“You must be joking,” Ohila said.

“Do I sound like I’m joking?” For a moment, Clara saw the same look in his eyes as she saw in the extraction chamber before he shot the General. He was building up. Please, let him have his way, she thought.

There was a pause, and Ohila’s voice came back, surprisingly respectful. “I understand. But we will still be watching.”

“Fair enough. Just don’t lip-read me. Have the audio changed to BBC1, I think they’re playing a David Bowie tribute.”

Clara looked puzzled. “What was that all about?”

The Doctor smiled warmly at her; a relief. She didn’t want to ever see him again the way he was the last time they were in this room together.

“Do you remember what you said to me in the Cloisters so long ago?” he said as he put his right hand on her left arm. Wait a second, was he stroking it? 

“Of course I do.” She let him hug her. “I felt so bad that only I could remember it. And all you had was that beautiful little song you played for me.”

“I kept playing it, too. I couldn’t remember what had made you special, but playing the song made me feel somehow still connected to you.”

Clara pulled out of the embrace.

“I’m glad you remember,” she said. 

“Say it again, please. I want to hear it again.”

And she did. And nearly regretted it as she saw the Doctor’s eyes filled with tears after.

“Thank you, Clara Oswald.” 

The Doctor reached back out and pulled Clara back close to him, but not a hug this time. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. Well, needs must, she thought as she moistened her lips. Instead, though, those incredible eyes – under those terrifying but strangely reassuring eyebrows – fixed her with a near-hypnotic gaze. Forget the accent and his penchant for mood lighting, she mused. If he’d asked, she would have given herself over to him right then and there, even if she might have had to improvise a few things for a second her mind even wondered if the surveillance camera was close enough to be covered by the Doctor’s coat… 

“Clara, you said people like you and me need to say things to one another. What you said to me in the Cloisters … and again just now … I don’t know if I can top that. But there is something I want, I need, to tell you but … I can’t do it unless a certain, uh, condition is met.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“My name.”

Clara’s eyes widened. “You told me there is only one time when you can safely tell anyone your...” The penny dropped. “Seriously?”

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “Seriously.”

Clara smiled and nodded her acceptance slowly. So much of their relationship had been about what went unsaid. They didn’t need to say anything else.

But a thought pricked at her thoughts. “What about River? You told me you hadn’t seen her off to the Library yet. I know you had something of an open relationship, but isn’t marrying me one step too far?”

And then the Doctor told her about what had happened a few months after they’d last met. Of meeting River on another Christmas planet. And how he had finally said goodbye to her, after one final twenty-four-year-long night.

“We spoke a lot, River and me, during those twenty-four years,” the Doctor said. “We spoke about a lot of things. And we spoke about you.”

“But River didn’t recognize me when I met her data ghost.”

“I never told her your name. The best thing about River was she knew how important spoilers were. I knew she’d meet you through Vastra and piggybacked on your consciousness to Trenzalore and those events had to play out otherwise I wouldn’t be here. You had to jump into my timestream, and she made it possible. Both for you to do that, and for you to survive so I could get you out.

“But on Darillium, River knew this much: that I’d fallen in love with you. Even with my memory Swiss-cheesed, she figured that out without me having to say it. She knew I had to erase those memories and why. I never told her about the confession dial, but she knew what happened here. She told me, before we parted, that she gave her consent if I ever wanted to ‘go domestic,’ as it were. River married several other men and a couple of women while she was married to me, too, so jealousy really wasn’t her strong suit.”

“I don’t want to share you. Not ever.” Clara was deadly serious now. “If we do this, promise me that you won’t just shrug me off like an old coat. You may be OK with polygamy, maybe that’s how Time Lords roll, but I’m not. I’m not saying you stay alone for the rest of your lives … for god’s sake find yourself another Amy or Rory or Donna or Sarah Jane … but promise me you’ll miss me, you’ll properly mourn me. No more punching diamond walls for billions of years or breaking Time, though. Just miss me.”

“Of course, Clara. Of course.” He didn’t tell her that he’d made the decision that if they married, he would look at no other person in “that way” for as long as this body survived. And maybe for quite some time after that, as well. He let himself get too close to her and heartbreak was the price — then, and now.

“The same rule applies to you that applied with Danny,” Clara continued. “You can miss me for five minutes every day, and then get on with it. Unless you’re trying to break out of a space prison or save a bunch of kids from a Scovox Blitzer. You can skip it on those days — I’ll understand.”

The Doctor smiled. It was a brave smile because he already knew those five minutes would be rough. Hell, he didn’t want to think about what his life would be like five minutes from now.

Clara smiled back, a wondrous smile that belied the fact that the spirit behind it would be gone forever in a very few minutes. If there was an encyclopedia definition of “living in the moment,” a photo of Clara at this moment would have been perfect to illustrate it. “So, what do we do? How do you become Mr. Oswald?”

“Mr. Oswald?”

“Sorry, _Dr._ Oswald.”

“That’s better.” The Doctor gently pressed his forehead against hers and they clasped hands. Then he straightened up and said, “Listen carefully to what I say: Clara Oswald, I fully consent to be your husband. Do you consent to be my wife?”

“Yes.”

“Now say it back to me...”

“Doctor, I fully consent to be your wife….”

The Doctor prompted her. “Do you…”

“Oh, uh, do you consent to be my husband?”

“Yes. And, seeing as there’s no one around to object …” With that the Doctor exhaled. “Not as much pomp and ceremony as there was with Queen Elizabeth, sorry. We don’t go in for the whole wedding cakes thing either, I’m afraid. I wish I could give you a ring of your own, but you can’t be wearing a wedding ring on Trap Street. So, just for now …” The Doctor slipped his own ring onto Clara’s finger. Clara gasped as the ring changed size automatically so that it fit perfectly.

Clara remembered when the dream crabs had taken control of her mind. She had told the Doctor, when he came into her own head to try and rescue her, that she’d only ever have considered marrying two men: Danny and the Doctor. No more dreaming. And just like that, she was the Doctor’s wife.

“I take it they aren’t into the whole kiss the bride thing either, eh?” she smiled up at him and her eyes focused on his lips again.

“Clara, I have something to tell you first.”

The Doctor pulled Clara close and she melted into his embrace. The Doctor put his lips to her ear. “My name is….”

***

Outside the chamber, Ohila and the General had been watching as the Doctor and Clara spoke and hugged, and then they saw him whisper into Clara’s ear.

“The sentimental fool,” said Ohila. “He’s married her and now he’s telling her his name.” 

Although she couldn’t hear the words being said, the General knew what was going on and was strangely moved. For someone about to die, she’d never seen anyone as joyful looking as Ms. Oswald; if anything, her eyes managed to get even bigger as she listened to what they all knew was the Doctor’s greatest secret, known only to a handful of people. Even the Matrix kept it private to all but the Lord President and a very select few others. “I don’t see the problem.”

“Think it through, General. It’s just going to be more difficult for them to part now. This is a very dangerous situation, indeed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sonny the stuffed fish from the Titan Comics makes his grand debut in the story. I left his fate unrevealed here since as I write this the comics have yet to complete story in which he/it appeared. The idea of Clara being annoyed by the fish is right from the comics, as is the idea of Clara having flirted with the Doctor in the bath (based on the artwork, mostly). And it was only when checking the name of the school in the story arc that I noticed it had "Raven-" in it.
> 
> Ace becoming a Time Lord is something established in the novels and audio dramas. The idea of Ace having an adventure with Sarah Jane is based on an episode Russell T Davies had planned for The Sarah Jane Adventures but was unable to make due to the passing of Elisabeth Sladen. Her returning to Earth and doing charity work also comes from dialogue in the SJA episode "Death of the Doctor."
> 
> I decided to follow the old-school idea that not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords and thus they don't all regenerate, so as to allow the old woman Claradvoratrelandin to meet Clara with her "original" face. As for the little shipping tidbit re: Romana: I was shipping those two way back in the 1980s, so this is a shout out to that. Someday I might write a reunion story with them.
> 
> I chose not to play around too much with the idea of Clara possibly being bisexual in this story other than a few hints, just as the TV series did. In keeping with the subtext of "might have beens and the never-weres" (taken from the extended lyrics of "Benson, Arizona," the theme to Dark Star that were added for a later cover version of the song), however, I introduced the notion here that Ashildr had feelings for Clara and they might have been reciprocated at some point if she hadn't been called back to Trap Street. Why they weren't over the course of 50 years? That's perhaps a question for another writer to answer.
> 
> The photo described as being on Clara's phone might sound familiar to those who remember Peter and Jenna's incredible visit to the 2015 San Diego Comic Con. The photo I tried to describe was one of my favourites from their visit.
> 
> I made a slight addition to the chapter on 6 Apr 2016 to reflect something that happened in the Titan comics after I'd uploaded the story initially. Also, I should note for the record that it is a coincidence that the Titan comic included the Doctor calling Sonny his perfect companion; I'd written my version of that two weeks before the comic came out (great minds...).


	6. The Farewell

Inside the extraction chamber, the Doctor pulled out of the embrace and Clara, her face streaked with tears, gazed back at him, silent. And then they sank into a warm kiss. 

“That was the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard,” Clara breathed as they separated.

“I wish you could pronounce it.” The Doctor nearly wondered aloud how River was able to manage it.

“You mean …” And then she said it. His name. Not perfectly, but the Doctor was stunned into silence for a moment because his name sounded so graceful, the odd misplaced syllable notwithstanding in her lilting Blackpool accent. 

“Clara Oswald, you never cease to amaze me.”

“What, I get to keep my maiden name?”

“Do you honestly think that would fit on a driving license? Hyphenated with Oswald, yet?”

An easy laugh followed. But then the Doctor saw the uncertainty in Clara’s big brown eyes.

“Doctor, this is making this harder for both of us, you know that, don’t you?”

“I did this so you will always be a part of me.”

“That idea of just forgetting the whole thing and just flying away somewhere is looking better all the time.”

“God, yeah.” The Doctor was smiling, but his eyes had become infinitely sad. And Clara saw this. And she kissed him again. 

“Imagine us curled up next to a fire. Your arms around me, just staring into the flames, you feeding me coffee,” a wistful look overtook Clara for a moment as she described the fantasy. “But we had some great times, didn’t we? Robin Hood, picnicking with the dinosaurs, bar-hopping in Glasgow with Strax, that practical joke Jane and I played on you where you thought she’d become a zombie!” She started to laugh as the memories came fast and furious. “And remember that time I snuck into the TARDIS and you were changing and you had on those ridiculous question mark underpants?”

“You laughed for the next three hours. I thought you’d gone insane.”

Clara snorted with laughter. “I remember I had the Benny Hill Theme running around my head with you chasing me around the console trying to get a scan of me with those sonic shades of yours and for some reason it made it even funnier because you didn’t get why I found it so funny.”

“I still don’t. But you laughed. And that’s what was important to me – that’s what was always important to me,” the Doctor said. “That was a memory I had lost. Thank you for letting me remember it… even if it was a wee bit embarrassing.”

“Well, I thought you looked cute.”

“And I always thought you were beautiful.”

Now that his memories had returned so many small details were flooding his mind. Including the fact the underpants incident had happened not long after Clara had been trapped by Bonnie the Zygon and for a time had thought she’d seen him die. Clara had chided the Doctor for how he reacted when he thought she was dead; she never told him that she’d felt the same way until she spotted the parachutes floating behind the debris of the presidential plane.

Clara’s eyes twinkled at the Doctor’s compliment, and then the light faded a little as she found herself addressing the elephant in the room. 

“You once told me that you were less breakable than me. Now I’m the less-breakable one. If I had my way, I’d stay with you forever, and you know I could. But I’d always be worried about you, and if you don’t think I wouldn’t jeopardize time and space to save you, you’re wrong, mister. But the worst part would be…”

Clara choked for a second. Her beautiful eyes glistening with tears that shouldn’t have been possible. “I know it sounds selfish. Maybe it’s me being the egomaniac again. But I wouldn’t want to outlive you. And I could have. I’ve already … I’ve already experienced a little bit of that. I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve been to a point in time where I know you no longer exist, and it was so sad. I never want to experience that again.”

“But you and I have been to the far future, the end of time, twice. And a few of my earlier selves made similar journeys from time to time.”

“I know, but the difference was you were with me.” 

“But don’t you realize, Clara — I feel the same. A universe without you … even when I didn’t have the memories I knew you were out there, somewhere. I’m going to lose you.”

“But I will always be with you. There are thousands of mes out there, right now, looking out for you. Winnie proved I didn’t stop with your first regeneration cycle, either. She was there to help you, not any of the others. Someday you may see me again, another me. Hell, you already know where to find one, just drop by Buckingham Palace next time you visit Vastra and the gang. Just don’t mention werewolves.”

“There will never be another you,” the Doctor mumbled. 

Knowing that any second the General and Ohila would be coming back, Clara made up her mind about something she had been mulling over ever since she left on her mission to get the Doctor back. “Doctor, I need to break a promise I made to Danny Pink a long time ago, and I hope he forgives me, but I want to say it, because it’s important and I want you to hear it,” she said. “Doctor, I …”

“I love you.”

That came from the Doctor, interrupting Clara. Clara’s eyes widened. The words actually sounded as if they were foreign to him. He reacted as if he just said something wrong, biting his nails. “Have you ever actually said that to anyone before?” 

The Doctor shrugged a little, but rather than saying anything, he was staring directly into her eyes, almost hypnotic. Clara gazed back at him.

“You made a promise to Danny. I don’t want to you to break that promise, not even with me. We owe him that much, you owe him that much.” The Doctor’s mouth upturned into a sad smile. “What you were about to say, I already knew. I’ve known for a long time.”

“How long?”

“I know you were conflicted on the _Orient Express_. But I truly realized you felt it back on Skaro when you forgave me about lying to you about Missy. You had every right to feel betrayed and angry. Instead, you’d smiled and made me promise to come back for you, just like I forgave you regarding your betrayal with the TARDIS keys. Then later, after that planet with the two-year-long New Year’s Eve party we went to that base in Scotland. I thought I was going to die, I knew for certain, when you convinced me not to. And of course, I think you made yourself pretty clear in the Cloisters.”

“Well, I fancied you the moment you showed up in that stupid monk costume outside the Maitlands and spent the night guarding me with your TARDIS, building that silly quadrabike. I kept fighting the urge not to fall in love with you for months, especially after you showed me how fleeting my life was during that thing with the haunted house. But then I finally let it happen. Want to know when?”

The Doctor nodded.

“Trenzalore. The second time we went there,” she said. “When you sent me away and you spent nine hundred years on your own in that bizarre town. I realized I wanted to be with you forever. And then … you changed. And dammit, Doctor, you pushed me away.” There were unexpected tears in her eyes. She’d thought it was water under the bridge but her feelings welled up. “Do you have any idea how much that hurt?”

“I thought you were just happy to be a friend. Regeneration can be hard on people who don’t have the ability, especially if the change is … profound. And you found Danny not long after.”

“Well, it did hurt. You know me, Doctor, keeping things bottled up. Thank god for Danny. And then there was that fiasco on the moon when I had my … wobble.” 

The Doctor hugged Clara close with that. “I still feel awful about how I made you feel. I thought I’d lost you.”

“You had. Did you know Danny didn’t want that? I think he knew how I felt about you but he still encouraged me to go with you on our ‘last hurrah’ on the _Orient Express_.”

“I wish I could have thanked him for that,” the Doctor said.

“But it backfired in the end because I realized I still … did you know that when I said ‘it’ to Danny, on the phone, I actually was saying it to you?”

“Seriously?”

“That scared me,” she said. “So I tried my best to keep my two lives separate. I tried to keep Danny, and I tried to keep you. It was a stupid idea, but that was how I felt. I realized I felt the same for you as I did for Danny, just in different ways. Your turn. When did you realize how you felt?"

“When you helped save billions of children on Gallifrey.”

“By convincing you to take another option.”

“It was you reminding me to never be a warrior, to be a Doctor. And then you had to go and kiss me in the Undergallery …” Clara cocked her eyebrow and the Doctor realized how that had sounded. “Shut up, you,” he laughed. “Anyway, my hearts were yours from then on. But I was too scared to let you know, so I stood back as you found Danny, though I was a bit grumpy about it and I was rougher on the lad than I should have been. I’ve carried the guilt of that with me for a long time, and it was something the neuroblock did not erase. I didn’t fall in love with Danny Pink, so why would I need to forget him, right? But if I’d known how limited our time would have been I’d have said something a long time before. When you agreed to fly away with me after the Santa Claus thing it was all I could do not to hug you tight and never let you go for a second.”

Clara put her head on the Doctor’s chest. Why did these conversations always have to happen so soon before an ending? She took another deep (unneeded) breath.

“I have to tell you another secret now,” Clara said. “I was going to tell you in the Cloisters, but I had other things to say then. Doctor, that morning when Danny died. I was … I was working up the courage …” Clara hesitated. Did she really want to say this? How would the Doctor react? Did it need to be said? A long-ago memory of a Post-It note on her bookshelf flitted across her memory: **Just Tell Him**.

Deep, unnecessary breath. “Doctor, I was going to break up with Danny.”

“What? No…”

“Yes, Doctor. After the thing with the forests taking over the earth, he gave me an ultimatum, him or you. So I had to make a decision, and that was fine. I knew the decision was coming. And I knew I felt the same way about both of you, just in different ways. I had to make a choice. Danny was wonderful and funny and he needed someone after the horrors he’d experienced in Afghanistan, and we were great together in nearly every way. But you and I … we were truly special. And we’d done so much, even before I’d met Danny. I’d made a long list of everything we’d done together and tried to make a similar list for him, but there was virtually nothing there for Danny. I chose you. But then Danny died and I felt so awful and he’d sacrificed so much for me, I just couldn’t let him go. And I meant what I said then; I would have joined him in the Nethersphere if I could have.” Clara looked at him, apologetically. 

“You never need to justify anything to me, Clara.”

With that, the door to the chamber slid open and Ohila and the General strode in with the technicians. The Doctor’s heart sank as he and Clara locked eyes for a moment. Not long now.

“Congratulations, you make a handsome couple,” deadpanned Ohila as, slightly self-consciously, the two broke away from each other. “But by our calculations there are only a very few minutes left before Ms. Oswald’s heart starts beating again.”

The General stepped forward, “Madame President…”

Clara blinked. “Madame what-now?”

The Doctor leaned in, conspiratorially. “Sorry, forgot to mention, the title of president is shared between spouses. Most presidents tend to be single so it doesn’t happen very often. The job plays hell with a love life. But you’re actually co-ruler of Gallifrey right now. With the same rights and privileges as the president, and the same governing authority.”

“Really?”

“Yup. You always wanted to be a Doctor. I figured it was time you were upgraded. How’s that egomania now?”

“Worse than ever.” Clara cocked her eyebrow and smiled. “So I can do anything?” she asked. With an oddly hopeful look on his face, the Doctor nodded.

She didn’t even have to think as her smile dimmed and she spoke clearly at the assembled Time Lords and Sisters of Karn. “There is to be no punishment brought on my husband, the Doctor, for what he did in extracting me.” Her eyes fixed on the General. “None.”

The General smiled. “I hated that body. I could never sleep through the night. The Doctor was doing me a favour. If anything, I owe him a drink.”

The Doctor and the General shared a nod of respect. The Doctor knew the General had been a victim of the randomness of regeneration — some Time Lords, like humans, were transgender by nature, but for those who weren’t it made for an awkward situation. The Doctor truly had had other priorities that day, but if he had to force regeneration on anyone, the timing was good for the General. And anyway, he owed the General for stealing his toy soldier back in the barn. One day, he might tell her the true story of that piece of lead just for the entertainment value of watching her have a double coronary.

For a moment Clara considered ordering that the Doctor be made president for life. She trusted him to be in charge of the Time Lords more than anyone. But she’d never do that to him. She had actually lied when she said no one hated the Time Lords more than she.

Clara sighed instead and made a different request. “After I return to Trap Street, this chamber is to be destroyed, along with any other similar extraction chambers on Gallifrey….”

“That is an outrageous demand,” the General began, her good humour of a moment ago stripped away.

“I don’t care. No one should ever go through this again. I was lucky enough to have someone who loved me by my side, otherwise I would have been put back to my death right away. It’s an awful thing to do to people, ask them a few questions, then say ‘Okay, thanks, off you pop to get killed.’ I don’t care the reason. And anyway, you know the danger we’re facing because of it right now. What if the Doctor had been killed and you hadn’t figured out a way to do this without him — or without your previous self present? What if someone like Missy used the chamber to rescue someone really nasty like Hitler? Destroy this chamber and all others like it on Gallifrey. You’re the lords of time. You’re better than this.”

Both Ohila and the General looked to the Doctor. But the Doctor said, “She’s the boss. And, General, remember Article 3.”

The General scowled. “Consider it done.”

Clara frowned, “What’s Article 3?”

Ohila pursed her lips and explained: “Article 3 of the High Council’s constitution says that the final orders of a person invested with the power of the presidency and who is facing permanent death cannot be countermanded or deviated from, which is why Time Lords are usually disallowed from holding office during their final life, because the order has to be carried out, regardless of what that order … is.” She turned to face the Doctor and uttered a phrase she’d learned during a sojourn on Earth billions of years earlier. “You son of a bitch. I knew you’d pull something like this.”

The General shot Ohila a look. “Something like what?”

The Doctor ignored them and turned to Clara. “You can order this chamber to be destroyed right now, before you go through. You can stop it now. You never have to go back. We can find a way to fix this. We always fix it.” 

Oh, no, Clara, thought — this wasn’t… “Wait a second. Did you marry me in order to get me powerful enough to make this order?”

“Clara, no, I…”

“How dare you?”

Not again, not after all they’ve been through. To be betrayed like this. This is why his memory had to be erased in the first place.

“You tricked me. You thought I would be so bloody selfish that I’d make an order like that, to save my own hide? Dammit, Doctor, you know if I don’t go through that door and die, and I end up coming back to life on this side, you won’t see me die and time won’t bring us to this point. You’ll die or worse, cease to exist. Everyone I love would cease to exist. Rigsy’s daughter would cease to exist. It’s the same bloody paradox loop that you threw in my face when I tried to get you to undo Danny’s death.” Good God, Clara realized. Is this how the Doctor felt when I tried to destroy the TARDIS keys and get him to bring Danny back? 

But then Clara saw that the Doctor was weeping. She barely registered Ohila and the General motioning everyone as far away from them as possible.

The last time she’d seen the Doctor like this was when we was almost struck childlike with guilt back in the Middle Ages, just before they were taken to Skaro with Missy.

“The Daleks call me the Oncoming Storm. I have changed the destiny of entire galaxies. I saved billions of children. I once saved reality itself. I punched a wall of diamond for billions of years. But I can’t save you. I just can’t save you. What bloody use am I? That’s why I have this face, remember? I am the Doctor and I save people, I said. _**Why can’t I save the people I love?**_ ”

The force to the Doctor’s words, so desperate, made the Time Lords step back even further. If Clara had bothered to look, she’d have seen several of them crying as the Doctor broke down.

Clara embraced him. “You also said sometimes the only choices we have are bad ones.” 

“Forgive me. It was a stupid idea. Stupid, stupid.”

“Of course I do,” she said, her hand resting on his chest. “But I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But my time truly is up now. You know we can’t fix this — you can’t fix this; if my heartbeat starts, everything ends. That includes you, River, Nan, Rigsy, his baby, Amy Pond, your granddaughter, the people in this room, that guy we saw sweeping the floor down the corridor when we came in — even Missy, who despite all she did I owe because she brought us together. I won’t give that order. The chambers will be destroyed, but only after I die. But, Doctor — look at me, Doctor — you went to the end of time itself for me. You have done more than anyone could possibly imagine. Never mind what I said earlier about asking you to be proud of me. Dammit, I am so proud of you. So proud. You are my hero.”

Clara kissed the Doctor again. “Never, ever, forget what I said to you in the Cloisters. I feel just as strongly now as I did then.”

The Doctor tried to smile. “And I feel exactly the same.”

Ohila raised an eyebrow as she overheard this. She had watched as the Doctor and Clara huddled together in the Cloisters, and she’d seen the Doctor’s reaction as Clara had spoken to him. When Ohila demanded to know what was said, Clara had refused, vowing to never tell anyone, ever. Considering what she was witnessing and hearing now, it must have been a hell of a thing she’d told him.

Her own rumination was interrupted when she realized that Clara was staring right at her. When she began to speak, her voice was slow, low and deadly.

“ **This** is why I want this chamber destroyed. The Doctor should never be seen like this, by anybody. He is supposed to be strong, and just, never cruel and never cowardly. He is a **hero**. I have one more order. There will be no more torture chambers like the one you put my husband through. If you are truly good people; if you feel that you **deserve** to be known as Time Lords, you will never do anything like that ever again. To anyone. Am … I … understood?”

The General could only nod. Good Lord, she would have made a powerful Time Lord, she thought. Technically speaking, of course, she already was one in all but official title. She and Ohila had already considered bestowing the title upon Clara as a tribute, but the Doctor’s decision to join with her instead trumped that idea. 

The Doctor, meanwhile, looked somewhat embarrassed as he calmed down. He wished he’d done that back in the TARDIS when they were alone. But it had to happen. Just as it had happened in the confession dial and they were probably all watching then, as well. And once again, it was Clara who had shown him the way through the darkness.

Clara had one more thing to say to the Doctor: “Remember those five minutes, but you are **the Doctor** , and the universe will eat itself if you don’t start acting like the Doctor again. I know you are in pain. Fight that pain, and win, which is what you’re good at. Direct that pain at the things that deserve it. There are worlds that need you, even if you don’t know it yet. Monsters to defeat. Friends to make. And, listen to me when I say this, please — people to love. Don’t close that book because of me. There is another River out there. Someday I’ll just be a pleasant memory, and you will move on. Maybe marry someone else. And I won’t hold you to those five minutes once you do. Please, do all of this for me.”

“I promise.”

With a nod from the General, a technician threw a switch and the portal leading to trap street opened. Clara started at the sight. It still amazed her that not fifty yards from where she was about to die, oblivious Londoners were chowing down on pub grub and beer. She nearly laughed as the absurd notion that maybe Ashildr was receiving a share of the tips at the pub struck her. Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny, he’d said. 

She turned to the Doctor. “Are you OK?”

The Doctor smiled sadly. “No.” He put a hand on each side of Clara’s face and kissed her forehead before resting his forehead on hers. “General,” he said. “I want to be the one to do it.”

“Lord President, you mustn’t.”

“I must and I will. No one will do this but me. It is my responsibility and mine alone.”

“Lord President, I can’t let you. She’s your wife.”

“I don’t want anyone else to do this,” the Doctor snapped.

Clara shook her head. “No…”

The Doctor fixed his piercing stare at her. This time his fear, his sorrow, had been replaced by resolve.

“No arguments. Let me help you save the universe one last time.”

Clara tilted her head and smiled. And then she took a deep breath.

The Doctor clasped her hands in his.

“I lost my tenth life because I wanted to save one dear, sweet man who loved his granddaughter more than anything else in the world. You gave your life so that a brilliant baby girl would grow up with a father. And she knows, Clara. Babies have a psychic link to their parents in those early months, and I can tell you right now she was singing a tribute to you that night. And she will grow up to be a hero, saving millions of lives by inventing a vaccine for a vicious disease that no one had even heard of yet that day on Trap Street. And I vow that I will tell her about you, and I will tell her daughter about you too. They named her Clara, after you.”

Clara’s eyes filled with tears again. 

“And do you want to know something else? Yes, I spent four and a half billion years in the confession dial, punching that damned wall. But I also spent all that time with you. All those years, you were my comfort, my strength. When I saw your face, in my mind, every time, it was the most beautiful thing in the world. It may have been hell, but you were there with me. Clara Oswald, you are _my_ hero, and always will be.”

The Doctor took her hand and kissed it. And then he put his hand under her chin and they kissed each other again. “Every second was worth it for this,” he whispered.

“If things were different, I would be with you forever.”

“Don’t worry, Clara. You’re inside my head, and you never leave, remember?”

The Doctor looked down at Clara’s hand where his ring looked so perfect on her. Clara smiled, wistful. So many possibilities. What ifs. Never weres. She nodded to the Doctor and he gently removed the ring from her finger. 

“Let me,” Clara said. She took the ring and returned it to the Doctor’s ring finger. It expanded to fit the larger digit. And it looked perfect. Clara took his hand and nuzzled it with her cheek. And then she kissed his knuckles, just as he had done with her.

“I never did believe in playing by the rules,” she said. “Fifty bonus years. I hope I give the quantum shade one hell of a headache.”

“Sixty seconds before your heart starts beating again, Clara,” said Ohila. “You must go now. Please.”

No more delays. No more tricks. Time to go. Both the Doctor and Clara knew they couldn’t afford any more delay. If they hugged now, they’d never let go, the universe be damned. But they held hands one last time.

“Goodbye, Doctor.” 

“Goodbye, Clara.”

Without another word, Clara released her grip, stood back and gave her husband the brightest smile she could muster. It was the smile she wanted to give him before he’d passed out from the neuroblock but was too grief-stricken then to manage. The Doctor smiled back, even though his eyes were filling with tears. She backed through the portal and turned around. 

***

And then she saw him again. She’d forgotten this detail from when she’d been extracted. Resplendent in a coat that was almost identical to the one she gave him later, the Doctor stood in the doorway. It was the younger Doctor’s eyes that broke Clara’s non-beating heart and caused her smile to falter. They were eyes that had yet to experience four and a half billion years of hell. Of forgetting her. Then remembering. And losing her again. And right now, they were just so immensely sad. 

She walked up to the younger Doctor, frozen in time and staring in shock at where she was dying. And she kissed his cheek. “Run, you clever boy. And remember me,” she whispered into his ear. 

“Thirty seconds,” said the General though the portal.

Fighting the urge to just run down the trap street and out into the London evening to run away in the Doctor’s TARDIS, Clara approached the raven, which was still suspended in mid-air, just as she’d left it half a century ago. When she turned, she stiffened slightly as a dull pain began to blossom from where she was shot only a few hours before. She concentrated on what was in front of her and tried to ignore the discomfort (fortunately it had been a form of pellet, not a proper bullet, so there was no danger of her suddenly collapsing in agony and bleeding out which would completely screw up the timeline, even if the final result was the same for her). As she was told, a very faint outline of her body filled the air in front of the ethereal bird that ended/would end Clara’s life.

And she laughed as a stray memory emerged. Of the bizarre experience of seeing herself from the rear that night of her first date with Danny. Her vanity at thinking she didn’t look half bad from that angle (from what she could see of her outline, she still didn’t). Of the even more bizarre experience she once had when she was a victim of one of the TARDIS’ practical jokes and found herself sharing a room — and, briefly, a bed (for practical reasons, of course) with different versions of herself spread over a few days of her time stream. That was the week the Doctor let her “camp out” in his TARDIS while he went on an expedition with some big-game hunter named Riddell. She’d made him promise never to leave her alone in the TARDIS again after that. Only good to come from it was the discovery of a small mole in the dead centre of her back she didn’t realize she had.

“Fifteen seconds,” the General said.

They say your life flashes before your eyes the moment before you die. Clara noted with amusement as she approached her final position that the saying was true as she saw herself replaying many more of her life moments in seconds. 

“Fourteen.”

Sharing a motorcycle ride with the Doctor back when he was young-looking and foppish and realizing how perfectly they fit together on that bike. How much she loved the freedom of the bike — he’d given her one afterwards that she rode for the last time the night before Trap Street. She’d left it to the Doctor in her will but never thought to ask him if he’d got it.

“Thirteen.”

Adventuring with Vastra, Jenny and Strax. The day she actually became the Doctor for a while. How much she loved being the Doctor. How bloody cool “The Boneless” was for a monster name. The Doctor always came up with the coolest names, though “The Sandmen” rocked, too.

“Twelve.”

Danny and the great times they had. The many nights they spent together, him giving her what the Doctor could not. Being there for her when being the Doctor’s companion became too much of a burden. Being there for each other to kiss away the nightmares.

“Eleven.”

The Doctor on the _Orient Express_ when — for the very first time — she actually realized she loved two men deeply at the same time, and even entertained the thought of spending the night with the Doctor, something she couldn’t have fathomed doing a few weeks earlier — and how guilty she felt after she told Danny she loved him on the phone, but realized she had actually spoken those words to the Doctor. 

“Ten.”

Ashildr — the woman responsible for so much of this sorry mess, yet who proved to be a good and loyal friend in the end. Kate, Osgood and the UNIT crew. Courtney Woods and all her other students at Coal Hill. Orson. Jane. Sonny, that damned stuffed swordfish. Missy, who despite her evil deeds still brought Clara and the Doctor together — and, by extension, created the Doctor. 

“Nine.”

Her gran, her dad … her mum. The leaf, long since lost. Her book of places to see before you die. She’d seen them all and thousands more besides. The leaf had been Page 1; Clara was now on the final page.

“Eight.”

The little girl at Akhaten. Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling — who were so much like the Doctor and Clara and who Clara learned lived a long and happy life together. Dear Prof. Grisenko. Cass and Lunn. Porridge. Angie and Artie. Osgood. Psi and Saibra.

“Seven.”

The echoes of herself spread throughout the Doctor’s lives, including Oswin Oswald and Clara Oswin Oswald, who had captivated the Doctor so long ago and led him to her. 

“Six.”

I’m joining you soon, my sisters, she thought. I just have to help save the Doctor (and everyone else) one last time, first.

“Five.”

Through the portal, two soulmates locked eyes one last time. Only then did her resolve falter a little. I don’t want to go, she thought. 

“Four.”

She turned to the raven. 

“Three.”

“Let me be brave.” 

“Two.”

She threw her arms out to her sides. I love you, Danny. I love you, Doctor.

“One.”

And Clara Oswald, who had been born in Blackpool, became a nanny after her mum died so young, met and fell in love with a captivating madman in a box who had shown her the stars, guided young minds as a teacher, met and fell in love with a troubled soldier, who had become so much like the Doctor all creation was threatened, who had spent fifty years helping people in need from one end of the galaxy to the other, who was not only the Doctor’s companion and helpmate, but now his wife … Clara Oswald heard and felt something she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. It was a slight thump in her upper chest that traveled through her rib cage and sent a chill through her body at the speed of light. There was only time for two final, joyous words to form themselves in her mind.

_I’m alive._

The Doctor threw the switch that resumed the time stream. He saw the raven punch into Clara’s stomach, saw her stagger back a step, a look of puzzlement on her face. He saw her eyes close on the pain as the quantum shade began to destroy her from the inside out. 

And then the portal snapped closed. 

The Doctor whirled around, anger blazing in his eyes. “Who the hell closed the portal?”

“I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor's ring finally plays a role in the story.
> 
> The underpants incident was inspired by both the Doctor's, er, "confession" in Zygon Inversion and a piece of fan art depicting Clara killing herself laughing when encountering the Doctor in said garment. In keeping with the "laugh at everything because it's always funny" theme I thought it worked well here, even in serious situations. Same with the Undergallery gag (which I couldn't resist). 
> 
> As for the Doctor finally breaking one of the show's rules. I didn't want Clara to break her promise to Danny so I let the Doctor break his promise to no one instead.


	7. The Ending

Ashildr walked into the chamber. “I have forgotten many things in my life, Doctor. But one thing I cannot forget was her scream that awful night. Clara told me she believed hearing her scream might have been what pushed you over the edge. She wouldn’t have wanted you to hear it again. And we can’t take that risk.”

“But I left her lying in the street, Ashildr! I just stumbled back inside like the cold-hearted idiot that I am. I never …”

“Would it have really made it any easier for you, then or now?”

“She was everything to me.”

“And we took care of her. I even allowed Rigsy to retain his memory. We never retconned him because I knew you wanted Clara’s sacrifice to mean something. We let him go home to his wife and daughter. We treated Clara with the greatest of respect. We took her home, we put her into bed, and I contacted UNIT and let them know, well, not all the details but enough. They took care of the rest.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I’d infiltrated UNIT decades before. They never knew about Trap Street so yours was not an empty threat, Doctor. You remember Osgood? She took a lot of the burden on herself to tell Clara’s family, her school. I’m sorry, but the general consensus at her school was she died of a broken heart from losing Danny.”

“Don’t be sorry. She loved him too. No law against loving more than one person, is there?” Rose, River, Romana, Reinette, even Sarah Jane. And there were others in his long life. Most of whom had no idea how he felt, because he always loved his companions more than they loved him. But only a select few … like Clara … oh, my Clara. She’s gone. She’ll always be gone… No, not in front of the other Time Lords. Not again. He’d already lost enough face. Weep later. In the TARDIS.

His mind raced, still trying to figure out any possible way of fixing this. He’d fixed it before. And Clara got to live for years more as a result. Without him, which was heartsbreaking, but still, she had had life and, from all accounts, it had been a pretty good one. In a brief moment, the Doctor worked through every contingency, but could find nothing. He wondered if it might be possible for him to take his TARDIS back to Trap Street so that he could hold Clara one last time. Maybe … maybe the healing factor that had protected her from injury all these years was still working. Maybe Clara sat up gasping a few seconds after the Doctor had been transported away?

“Ashildr, I have one question, and you will answer: did you ever see me on Trap Street after Clara died. I mean moments after?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I did not. I know what you are thinking and we retrieved her body the moment you left. Rump and Rigsy helped to bring her inside. There was no time for you to have seen her. And I sat vigil with her after we sent Rigsy home as we worked out how to get her home without alerting the authorities. You never came. I oversaw Trap Street until the mid-twenty-first century when we were forced to relocate, and, as far as I am aware, you never set foot in that part of London again, in any of your lives.”

That was that, then. He could not be party to yet another paradox. And Ashildr made it plain that there was no miracle resurrection for Clara; surely if there had been, she’d have said. To be honest, he never expected a last-moment miracle. Time saved those for people other than the ones he loved.

He took a deep breath and turned to the assembled group. “You heard my wife’s final orders and I expect them to be carried out. End this chamber and all others like it. Now. I don’t want to be on this godforsaken rock any longer than I need to so you will need a new Lord President. Don’t wait a century. I appoint Ohila.”

“Screw that.” 

The Doctor decided he liked Ohila after all and was actually grateful to share a smile with her. Then he continued. “The General then?” The General bowed her head in acceptance. 

“I have a final order and Article 3 be damned, it will be followed: no one here is to ever forget what Clara Oswald of Earth, my wife, did today. This woman had immortality in her grasp, and now she’s dead so the pudding brains on this and every other planet can go on with their insignificant lives. You will not forget her. When Gallifrey is dust I want the final grains of sand to stand as a monument to that impossible girl who as far as I am concerned is the greatest hero to walk the face of Gallifrey. Keep naming your toilets and broom closets after Rassilon for all I care — this is what matters. Do you understand me?”

The General-cum-President nodded. 

The Doctor strode out of the extraction chamber without glancing at anyone. By the time he was at the lift down the hall, he could already hear the demolition of the chamber beginning.

He didn’t realize Ashildr was with him at first.

“What are you doing here, Me?”

“I don’t belong here any more than you do. Our TARDIS has been confiscated. I have no way of leaving here except with you.”

They arrived at the Doctor’s TARDIS. They went inside and the first thing Ashildr noticed was Clara’s farewell message on the blackboard.

The Doctor’s eyes met Ashildr’s for a moment, and the Viking immortal nodded. The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the blackboard, which shuddered as the chalk words evaporated.

The two stood staring at each other for a few moments. And then the Doctor enveloped Ashildr in a hug. It was not a hug of friendship, per se; both new that there were too many issues between them for that to ever apply. Instead, like two strangers hugging after surviving terrible disaster, it was a hug between two people grieving the loss of someone of importance to both of them. 

“I won’t presume to ask for your forgiveness, Doctor, but I was glad that Clara forgave me.”

“That was very like her. She even forgave Missy for what she did to Danny.” 

“Clara asked me to give you this,” Ashildr said as she took a small square of plastic-like material out of her vest pocket.

“A TARDIS memory chip,” the Doctor said. “What’s on it?”

“Clara,” Ashildr said. “When we returned the TARDIS to you the first time, we erased all records of her from the memory banks, but Clara hoped someday your memory would return and you’d probably want to have this information back again, so she made a backup first. Photos, audio recordings, video.” She laughed. “Even that bizarre situation where the TARDIS played a trick on Clara and put her in a time loop while you were away. It’s all here.”

The Doctor smiled. Another fond memory. He snapped out of his reverie. “Thank you. So, where would you like to go?” The Doctor asked, honestly curious where a trillions-year-old immortal who had spent decades already with a TARDIS of her very own might possibly want to be taken.

“Only one place, Doctor. You see, Clara is not the only person who owes a debt to the universe….”

***

Trillions of years into the future, the TARDIS arrived on the final flicker of what was once Gallifrey. Through the monitor, the Doctor and Ashildr watched as their past selves walked over to what would later become Clara’s TARDIS and go inside. The future versions exited the Doctor’s TARDIS and walked over to where two plush armchairs and a chess set were sitting. Ashildr sat down – the seat still warm from where her past self had sat moments before. The Doctor sat in the second chair, and they waited.

Clara’s TARDIS sat immobile, and the Doctor frowned as a memory returned. “Right now, Clara is pleading to be allowed to keep her memories. And in a few moments I’ll be losing mine,” he said.

“I know, I remember, Doctor. But you might not want to know what happens next.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. So do you want to ask me or don’t you?”

“About what?”

“Why the chess set? Why the two chairs?”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“A final beacon, a final call. One last bit of hope to see if anyone else existed out there besides me. I rather hoped it would have been you, to keep me company at the end. Although the circumstances were adversarial, I was glad you came here with Clara, because it not only saved my life, I wasn’t alone anymore.”

“You seem to have gotten your wish the second time around, too,” the Doctor said with a warm smile. 

Just then, the Doctor heard a single scream of anguish from inside Clara’s TARDIS. 

Although designed to be soundproof, there were occasions where sound could bleed through the dimensions. The Doctor jumped at the sound. It had been Clara.

“What just happened, Ashildr?”

“You’ve just passed out and that was Clara realizing she’d lost you. I had to force her to dematerialize the ship because I knew the universe was ending and at that moment I was unfamiliar with the operation of the vessel.” Out of respect for Clara, Ashildr chose not to tell the Doctor that after he’d fallen into unconsciousness, Clara had broken her vow to Danny, quietly repeating, “I love you, Doctor, stay with me. I love you, stay with me,” as she’d cradled him. They never spoke about this afterwards and Ashildr would have pretended not to have heard if they had. She’d regretted intruding on such a private moment. 

For a moment, the Doctor regretted everything. The billions of years in the confession dial, the extraction … because it led to Clara being so utterly heartbroken. He never wanted that.

“What happened after?”

“It wasn’t a happy few minutes. After the ship dematerialized, she tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“Pure emotion. Understandable. She blamed me for everything — Trap Street, turning you into a monster, losing you. Even then I knew how much she was in love with you, just like I saw through your understatement when you said she was ‘just a friend.’ I let her rant and I let her strike and I let her take me by the throat until she was spent. Of course she was unable to harm me. And then we took you home.”

“You mean to Earth.”

“If you say so. Anyway, we meant to take you to some place like Glasgow but we missed and ended up in the American desert. Not bad for a first try, really. She’d really been paying attention to all those years of lessons you were giving her. She got the planet right, the time zone right, so two out of three ain’t bad, as they say. Fortunately there was a man driving nearby and we were able to leave him with you. That was going to be farewell, but Clara insisted that she wanted to know you were okay. It took us months to set up that little charade with the diner. We knew you’d eventually return to Nevada to find out more about this mysterious Clara — and perhaps find clues as to who nicked your TARDIS. After all, you could never resist a mystery.”

“Why not just leave the TARDIS where it was and let me retrieve it?”

“I wanted to. I understood completely your rationale for undergoing the memory block and I supported your decision. But Clara wouldn’t let it be. She said it was the only way she could move on. At first, her rationale was sound as we realized we had to ‘de-Clara’ the TARDIS anyway — erase any records and images from the TARDIS’ computer, retrieve Clara’s things, to help you forget her. She wanted to leave you that message on the blackboard and we also stopped off at a shop she knew in London where she bought you that coat to replace the one you’d worn the day she visited Trap Street. But that wasn’t good enough for Clara. We argued for days about how dangerous it was, but ultimately she told me either I went along with her plan or she’d leave me behind.”

“And that plan was?”

“To try and get you to remember her. I said it was a fool’s errand. I told her if she’d outright said she was Clara it might have caused damage to you since the block was still settling in your brain. I observed through the monitor and she tried virtually everything to get you to remember, even playing ‘your song’ on the jukebox.”

A long-suppressed memory of a young brunette singer warbling an old Queen number on the _Orient Express_. The warmth of Clara hugging his arm and nestling her head on his shoulder, even as she was working up the courage to say goodbye to the travelling life and give herself over to Danny completely. It was the same night she came close to kissing him outside their cabins. It was the same night he’d thought Clara might have asked him to spend the night with her; he honestly had no idea how he might have replied had that have happened because as much as Clara was conflicted, so was he. 

Fortunately, there was a mystery to solve which took his mind off Clara for a while. He could never resist a mystery. Which is what got Clara killed, of course. The Doctor forced himself to suppress this thought (he hoped it would eventually get deleted like he'd forgotten sign language) and instead focused on remembering the song. It had been playing when he first entered the diner and saw Clara resplendent in a bluer-than-blue waitress costume. He hadn’t noticed, he thought with guilt. He hadn’t noticed anything, then, dammit. Even before the memory block, he had no idea Clara considered anything to be “their song.” Though it was the song the Doctor had composed himself that Clara wanted to hear during their final interlude on the TARDIS.

“She tried, but it didn’t work,” said the Doctor only now registering the hurt on Clara’s face after he’d finished telling her his story about Gallifrey and losing Clara and how he’d said he’d always be able to recognize her. Yet in truth her face had been kissing distance from his the whole time and he hadn’t been able to recall her. How that must have hurt her, he thought, realizing that she must have felt worse than he did that awkward day after his regeneration when he begged Clara to “just see me.” Would she have done if his previous self hadn’t had the brainwave to phone her from the past? He never wanted to ask her. For half a second, the Doctor entertained an insane notion of phoning his past self, the idiot with the guitar, in the diner and telling him that he was with Clara and to hold onto her and never let go. To tell her she was loved. Paradox be damned. But no, the Doctor dismissed the idea almost instantly. Paradox not be damned. There was too much at stake. 

“No, it didn’t work,” Ashildr acknowledged. “And she was even more upset than before — not in front of me, but after we dematerialized the TARDIS and she went to change out of that waitress costume, her cheeks were wet when she came back and I knew she’d been crying. But at least she could say goodbye to you one last time, in her own way. And it did some good as she remembered the heartbreak and was determined to let you live your life without her.”

“I never told her that I was very impressed with that ‘waitress’. If she hadn’t dematerialized her TARDIS, I might have asked her to travel with me. I hadn’t felt that connection with someone so quickly since I met one of her echoes in Victorian London. I never know when; I only know who.”

“Why do you think she left in such a hurry? She knew the signs. She’d been through that before. And she wouldn’t have been able to say No if you had asked. You were the Hybrid — and you nearly became the hybrid again today.”

The Doctor smiled and looked out at the remaining star in the sky. “Not long now.”

“Your calculations are actually a bit off. It’s not quite five minutes to hell. More like fifteen. But I liked your metaphor earlier so I didn’t really want to correct you. And Clara was in no condition to debate specifics either. So what do you say, Doctor — a quick game of chess before the end?”

Somehow the Doctor produced a bottle of wine and two glasses, seemingly out of thin air. He poured them both a glass of pinot noir.

“Here’s to the universe, to wise immortals, and to Clara.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Ashildr. Something caught her attention in a corner of what used to be the Cloisters. “Well, what do you know? I don’t remember seeing that last time I was here.”

A faded plaque was set into one of the pillars. It read, in part, “ _In honour of Clara Oswald of Earth, whose sacrifice ensured a future for us all. Loving wife of The Doctor, Lord President of Gallifrey._ ”

The Doctor smiled. “I’m glad they paid attention to me for once. They even spelled her name right.” He figured Ohila probably had something to do with the wording, as the phrase “loving wife” would have been alien on Gallifrey and somehow it managed to sound a little sarcastic. Just like Ohila. The Doctor didn’t mind; Clara would have gotten a kick out of it.

At twelve minutes to hell, the two old souls began the universe’s final game of chess. It ended in stalemate six minutes later.

At the actual five minutes to hell, the final star flashed out, leaving the Doctor and Ashildr sitting in near-darkness until Ashildr lit a small pocket light like the type used in camping, casting a faint glow that barely illuminated their features. Not long now; already they could feel the temperature dropping. The Doctor asked Ashildr to reconsider — he even went so far as to invite her to travel with him — but this time it was the immortal’s turn to put her foot down. 

“I’d like to think what you gave me back when I was Ashildr was a gift more than a curse, but as you yourself once said, ‘Everything has its time and everything dies,’ and I’m ready to finally die.”

“You might not, you know.” For the Doctor that was a horrific thought.

“Then maybe I’ll become like one of the Ancients who came into this universe from the previous one. Which means I’ll get to explore and experience and establish a brand-new universe. Either way, I win.”

“Just stay away from circuses.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Old story.”

At two minutes to hell, Ashildr poured herself a final drink and told the Doctor it was time for him to leave. For a moment she was no longer the ancient immortal, but the scared little girl the Doctor had saved so long ago. The two exchanged a warm hug. The Doctor said, “Thank you, Ashildr. Not just for everything you did for Clara, but for everything you have done throughout time. I will not forget you.”

“Just be nice to me next time we meet.” She winked at him. “I wouldn’t put it past you to end up in the next universe some day.”

The Doctor laughed. And then he turned to her one last time. 

“And Ashildr. I want you to know that I do forgive you.”

“Thank you, Doctor. That means a lot to me. I have one final gift.” She pulled out another TARDIS memory chip. “This is me. My diaries. Please keep them safe.”

“I will.”

“There is a lot of Clara in here, too. She didn’t keep a journal of our travels, but I did. It’s all here.”

“Thank you.”

“Farewell, my friend.”

At thirty seconds to hell, the Doctor ran into his TARDIS and madly flipped switches to dematerialize the ship before the final heat death. He nearly didn’t make it; the monitor showed the last remnants of Gallifrey disintegrating — and, with it, the trillions-of-years-long life of Ashildr the Viking either came to an end or she began a new journey in another realm of existence. 

The TARDIS continued standing on a final chunk of Gallifrey before finally dematerializing. The Doctor, awed by this, said aloud. “What do you know, Clara? I was right — I really did become the last person in the universe.”

With his memory of Clara restored, and with Clara now forever lost, the Doctor was able to do the one thing he had been prevented from doing. Something that he needed to do. 

As he set his TARDIS on a course for Earth, he made sure to be very careful not to arrive too closely to the date of Clara’s death. He didn’t want to chance encountering Ashildr or Rigsy, and he frankly couldn’t bear the thought of witnessing Clara’s funeral. He chose a sunny summer day a few months later, instead. He was thankful the cemetery was miles from Trap Street. He intended to enter instructions creating a no-landing zone within a six-block radius of it. It didn’t matter if it was 2017, the twenty-fifth century or 1792, he never wanted to go anywhere near there again if he could help it.

The Doctor parked the TARDIS a few kilometres away from the cemetery and brought Clara’s motorcycle out of the TARDIS’s on-board garage. He’d been asked to retrieve it by Osgood the first time he visited Earth after seeing Clara in the diner. At the time, Osgood had simply said that an anonymous friend the Doctor had once helped had passed away and left the motorcycle to him. It was beautiful, if a bit on the small side for him, and the Doctor had accepted the gift, put it into storage and thought no more about it for the next fifty years. Now, with his memories of Clara restored, he knew full well the story of the bike and what it meant to her, and to him.

Putting on a helmet, the Doctor kicked the starter and roared down the country lane towards the cemetery. He cut the engine and coasted once he passed the gates, out of respect for the dead and the handful of people seen kneeling next to or standing by assorted gravestones. He got off his bike and walked up the hill, stopping along the way to pause at one weathered stone. He placed his hand on it and closed his eyes for a moment. “Thank you,” he whispered before walking away from the marker with the name “Clara Oswin Oswald” engraved upon it.

A little further on, he approached another gravestone. It was a simple marker with a name, date of birth and date of death. Ironically, the Doctor realized he never actually paid attention to what day it was when he and Clara arrived on Trap Street. He discovered it had been early spring. Her favourite time of year on Earth. 

There were fresh flowers by the grave. The Doctor felt it wasn’t his business to see who had left them, though he spotted one card with the name “Adrian” scrawled across it. That had been one of her fellow teachers, the lad who in the right light sort of resembled the Doctor’s previous self; the Doctor had once mistaken him for Clara’s new boyfriend and had been disappointed to hear Clara didn’t actually fancy him. Another card had been signed by Osgood. Twice. The Doctor smiled at that. Despite the terrible things she had done, the Osgood that used to be known as Bonnie and who had so masterfully impersonated Clara, even sharing some of her memories (did Bonnie know how Clara felt about him, he wondered), carried some of Clara inside her and was now trying her damnedest to make amends as one of the Osgoods, defenders of the earth. He felt good about that. And it was yet another thing that he owed Clara, because it was her influence on Bonnie that had allowed him to get through to the rogue Zygon and save the world once more.

The Doctor placed a large red leaf on the marker. The same type of leaf as the one that led to Clara being born in the first place, and that she carried with her when they started their travels, only to sacrifice it to appease a hungry "god."

The Doctor frowned. There was something missing from the stone. He took out his sonic screwdriver and made a few adjustments. He ran the device over a blank part of the stone and symbols appeared. Satisfied, he put the sonic away. It would probably confuse a few people to see the added words and he hoped no one would mistake it for vandalism. But he didn’t care.

The symbols were High Gallifreyan lettering, the sonicship a little shaky due to the Doctor not having written the characters for a long time. Untranslatable by the TARDIS, Clara’s family and friends who might someday return here to pay their respects would dismiss the letters as design elements. But for those who could read it, the message was clear. 

The closest translation to English was: “ _Beloved companion of The Doctor, never forgotten, always cherished._ ” Even though she had become his wife in the end, the Doctor actually put far more power and more strength into the word “companion.”

“That word is yours now, Clara,” the Doctor vowed aloud. He knew others would travel with him, become his friends, his associates, his colleagues. He once eschewed the term, even joking that she was his “carer.” But no … Clara was his _companion_. No one else would ever be called that. Not by him. 

Finally, the Doctor took a deep breath and, with tears welling up, he said one word that he’d said several times to Clara during this whole ordeal, but had never meant it for real. Because he was the Doctor. He was the man who did not like endings, avoided them whenever possible. It nearly — scratch that; it did — cost him so much with Clara. 

He knew he would never come back to this place. And he knew Clara would not have wanted him to, either. Wherever she was now, whether with Danny in some alternate plane of existence, walking beside him as a ghost (wouldn’t that be something, he thought), or perhaps reborn in another time and another place to perhaps some day join him again in his travels, he knew an ending had come. One he had to acknowledge. She would have wanted it that way.

“Goodbye.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Edit: May 15, 2016: I have uploaded a coda/sequel to this story, set an unknown number of years into the future. It is titled "The Big Red Button" and can be found at http://archiveofourown.org/works/6862918) - link corrected May 18
> 
> I let the story continue on because I felt that both Ashildr and the Doctor needed more closure after Clara left. The idea of Ashildr becoming a Great One and moving into the next universe was a late addition. The circus, of course, refers to the one in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. And yes, I do think Ashildr went on to the next universe.
> 
> Giving this a re-read I notice I have the Doctor and Clara kissing a lot in the last couple chapters, maybe a little too much. But I think if this were to really happen, after having "broken the taboo" in the TARDIS earlier, and knowing they only had minutes left together, they would, even if it came off as a bit repetitious from the outside. 
> 
> Thanks for reading this far and I hope you found this version of the tale interesting.
> 
> (PS. I'm not sure why but the additional notes that may be displayed below were meant to be shown for Chapter 1. Not sure how they ended up here...)

**Author's Note:**

> Based on working out ages given on screen, a calendar year reference given in “In the Forest of the Night,” (which though it aired in 2014 is said in dialogue to take place in 2016) and factoring in “Last Christmas,” and the time jump between the end of Series 7 and “The Day of the Doctor,” I am of the opinion that Clara was in her early thirties by the events of “Face the Raven” (much as Amy was a number of years older than Karen Gillan at the end of her time). There’s some wiggle room on this, but in my opinion I think Clara was possibly as old as thirty-two by the time of her death. I don’t give an explicit age, but just in case anyone wonders why I say she is “north of eighty” which might not work out in the math for some, this is why.
> 
> Winnie Clarence was introduced in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "Blood and Ice". This chapter also features my attempt at working out the Orson Pink conundrum.


End file.
